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A Room With A StewRoom with a Stew, Colston Hall ★★★★★

By Ken McCormick in The Bristol Post Posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2015

STEWART Lee likes to give his audiences a hard time. From the people in the balcony – always more stupid and less committed than those in the stalls – to anyone who laughs at the wrong bit, verbally slapping his paying public about a bit is a regular ice-breaker in his shows.

But tonight he’s really got it in for the Colston Hall audience. The bloke who tried to take a picture on his mobile phone didn’t help things, and as for the woman who tried to nip out five minutes before the interval from her seat in the front row – yes, the front row – well, you can hardly say she didn’t deserve a bollocking she’ll never forget in front of a packed house.

But, to take a mid-set reference to Fifty Shades of Grey completely out of context, we’re masochists in this audience and we really love it when he treats us like dirt. For, as Lee later points out for the hard of understanding, it’s all for a laugh – it’s an established part of the act.

Even when the audience hasn’t done anything, what Lee imagines we are thinking can spur him on to more vitriol, as evidenced during a section on Islamophobia where he flies off the handle again.

At the same time, everyone knows that behind each laugh there’s a message. Whether it’s the toilet troubles of a cat named after a UKIP politician or the demise of the Downton Abbey dog, everything is carefully crafted to make a point about people and our prejudices

Casting himself as an outsider, standing apart from the observational comedians on arena tours and panel show regulars (Mock The Week takes a kicking, not for the first time), Lee is nonetheless on an upward trajectory which shows no sign of stopping.

His last series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle for the BBC has a Bafta nomination. During these two sold-out Colston Hall dates he’s working through some half-hour segments which should eventually form episodes of the next series.

Among others in the firing line tonight are Jim Davidson, Katie Hopkins, Roy Chubby Brown and liberal columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

That’s not to say Lee stints on using his own failings and embarrassments of course. (Real or made up? It doesn’t matter, we’re laughing.)

But it’s the surreal twists the set can take, where Lee’s timing, sense of the absurd and use of repetition combine, which leave me convulsing with laughter.

Sometimes, at several points in the first half of the show, it seems as if everything is going wrong and the set is on the verge of falling apart. But we know better than that – he’s in control, and the audience can’t get enough of it.

5/5

Written by Ken McCormick in The Bristol Post on 26th April 2015. Filed Under: A Room With A Stew, Reviews, Series 4, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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