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Vegetable StewVegetable Stew REVIEW; Sheffield City Hall

By Sarah Dunn in The Star Posted on Friday, October 8th, 2010

SHEFFIELD was privileged to have been one of only a handful of places for comic Stewart Lee to test out his new material when he arrived in the city as part of the Grin Up North festival.
And the taster of the Vegetable Stew served up to the crowd at City Hall certainly seemed to go down well.

Kicking off proceedings was his friend and fellow comedian Simon Munnery – aka Alan Parker, Urban Warrior – who also supported him on the If You Prefer A Milder Comedian…tour earlier this year.

The set met with a good reaction, from his conspiracy theories about the D(H)SS (“they dropped the H, how long before they lose the D?) and his observations on how society could change for the better (“one woman, two votes, because a lot of women have trouble making their minds up”).

Lee’s show followed a format that fans will be all the more familiar with now if they have read his new book ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Death of a Stand-up Comedian’ which sets out to dissect a comedy performance in all its glory.

Some might argue the technique backfires- that jokes stripped down and explained lose their humour – but it works, not least because it’s so unlike anything else out there.

And so right from the start you’re told they’ll be about 20 minutes of material about charity, 20 minutes about politics, and so on – with the acoustic guitar accompanying him on stage explained away as the grand finale to the show.

The repetition and references to little notes – whether they be scrawled on scraps of paper folded up in his pocket or on his hand using a felt tip bought from a sales assistant in WH Smith on Fargate who was somewhere in the crowd that night – which are a regular feature in his stand-up were both there, providing a helping hand as he drummed the characters and the themes into the audience with complete
tirelessness as the laughter built around him.

Topics veered from his granddad’s crisp obsession to Adrian Chiles’ “grand gesture” of a beard shave for Sport Relief (he was being ironic of course), and an elaborate tale about time spent with David Cameron while they were both students at Oxford University – which
obviously turned out to be entirely made-up.

It was the posh crowd from the university’s Bullingdon Club – made up of the likes of Cameron and Boris Johnson in its day – that came in for a ribbing in Lee’s finale song, belted out whilst perched on a stool playing his guitar in the spotlight, his moody singer-song writer presentation hilariously at odds with the content.

Leaving the stage and executing a little jog through the auditorium out of the door, he promised to be back soon – and it was clear the crowd can’t wait.

Written by Sarah Dunn in The Star on 8th October 2010. Filed Under: Reviews, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Vegetable Stew
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