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Vegetable StewVegetable Stew, Leicester Square Theatre ★★★

By Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph Posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

His perfectionism is much-loved, but there’s only so much antipathy or disdain an audience can stomach.

Watching Stewart Lee in action these days is like standing on the edge of a frozen lake and seeing a man half-submerged in the perishing ice. You throw him a rope – but he hurls it back. You didn’t throw it correctly, he advises. And anyway, he was fine as he was, until you ruined it all. Didn’t you know that sub-zero was his natural habitat?

On the night I caught Lee at Leicester Square Theatre – where he’s cooking up generous helpings of new material for his second TV series – he had a go at someone for tainting a satirically finessed anecdote about David Cameron’s behaviour while a student at Oxford. The punter’s crime? A cheery one-word interjection. He also berated some poor sap who had tried to creep out before the climax of the first half. “Sit back down,” he commanded. At such moments, Lee makes Kim Jong II look comparatively relaxed about dissent.

It’s tempting to say that he knows what he’s doing. After more than 20 years in the business no one does deadpan comedy quite like him. Part of the joy of his material is the way he deconstructs it. He advises us, say, to pay close attention to the motifs in a faux-interminable riff about his granddad’s fondness for crisps – or divides us into sections, each in its varying degrees of responsiveness a sorry disappointment. It’s clever – yet I’d counsel him to be careful. Whether or not it’s laced with irony, there’s only so much antipathy or disdain an audience can stomach. The self-consciousness of Lee’s on-stage persona allows him to deliver some invigorating kicks. He can critique younger, richer comedian Russell Howard’s good deeds while implicitly acknowledging his own shortcomings. He can also drench nostalgia for the 1980s with incendiary provocation, harking back with mock-fondness to the IRA (“I’m glad they’re coming back – I hope they have a good go”). But his self-awareness can tip into the kind of self-regard that simply leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Alienating office-party types is one thing but not cutting his core constituency any slack looks self-defeating. No one wants, or expects, to see Lee, 42, sell out and play the 02. Nor does anyone who admires what he does want to see him wind up playing to an audience of zero. I love the perfectionism, Stew, but maybe it’s time to lighten up a little?

Written by Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph on 7th December 2010. Filed Under: Reviews, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Vegetable Stew
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