Stewart Lee

Edfest Bouquets 2015

It’s been an amazing August for us at Bouquets & Brickbats. We’ve spent the entire month running from show to show, and have seen some truly brilliant performances. Here’s our pick of the best we’ve seen at this year’s Fringe:

Drama Bouquets

Phantom Owl Productions – Filthy Talk for Troubled Times by Neil La Bute
Phantom Owl Productions – Fault Lines by Stephen Belber
Paines Plough – Lungs by Duncan McMillan

Monologue Bouquets

Noni Stapleton – Charolais by Noni Stapleton
Thom Tuck – Scaramouche Jones by Justin Butcher
Tom Neenan – The Andromeda Paradox by Tom Neenan

Stand-up Comedy Bouquets

Stewart Lee – A Room With A Stew
Sarah Kendall – A Day In October
Garrick Millerick – A Selection of Things I’ve Said to Taxi Drivers

‘Ones to Watch Out For’ Bouquets

Alfie Brown – Isms
Morro and Jasp – Morro and Jasp Do Puberty
Master of None Productions – Foxfinder by Dawn King

Philip Caveney and Susan Singfield

Stewart Lee: A Room With a Stew

11/08/15

Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh

“No one is equipped to review me,” says Stewart Lee – and I doubt I’m the first reviewer to feel compelled to include the line in my review. And he’s right, in a way; he’s fiercely intellectual, this comedian, and I’m sure he could shoot down in flames any criticism I might make.

It’s fortunate, then, that I don’t have much to criticise; we’re already fans; we went to this show secure in the knowledge we would like it. It’s our wedding anniversary, after all (we got married a year ago, while at the Fringe), so of course we chose a show we knew we’d relish; we wanted to enjoy the day.

We’ve seen this show before, or, at least, we’ve seen a show with the same title and a few of the same routines. That was back in March at the Lowry in Salford, where – although the material was as deft and challenging as you might expect – the room was too big, and the whole thing felt a little too remote.

Not that Lee is aiming for ‘engaging’ or ‘crowd-pleasing;’ he references Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and it’s certainly a technique he likes to employ, simultaneously haranguing his audience for being “the wrong sort” and appealing to the vanity in all of us when he says those wrong ’uns are “not like my core audience: those of you who understand what it is I do.” We all want to be in Stewart’s gang; we all want to be clever enough to be in on the joke.

The second half of the show is my favourite: Lee’s quest to mine the “lucrative Islamophobic observational comedy market,” along with his trademark meta-commentary on the very idea of jokes, is just breath-taking, really: it’s rigorous, uncomfortable, demanding – and very funny.

It’s Stewart Lee; of course it is.

5 stars

Susan Singfield

Stewart Lee – A Room With A Stew

12/03/15

The Lyric Theatre, Lowry, Salford Quays

In the cavernous environs of the Lyric Theatre , Stewart Lee cut a lonely (and somewhat distant) figure on a massive stage. Stand up comedy always works better in a more intimate venue, so he had his work cut out to get his unique and cynical brand of humour across to an audience of sixteen hundred people. The fact that he was doing four nights here testified to the fact that, largely thanks to his enduring ‘Comedy Vehicle’ slot, he’s somewhat better known than other comedians of his ilk, but he’s yet to step up to the Michael Mcintyre arena-sized venues that have become the norm for so many comedians, most of whom have neither the intelligence nor the edginess of Mr Lee.

As ever, he was quick to mock the middle-class audience, imagining the reactions of people who’d been taken along to see him and were ‘waiting for the jokes to start.’ Tonight, his subjects ranged from UKIP (OK, an easy target but one that he demolished with characteristic glee) Norris McWhirter (!!!) and Rod Liddle, who came in for undreamed of levels of venom. Lee wheeled out all of most familiar tropes and devices. His use of repetition is by now legendary and he always manages to walk that difficult tightrope between the hilarious and the downright irritating. I was kept laughing constantly throughout the two sets and let’s face it, that is pretty much the object of the exercise.

I’d love to see his act in a smaller venue, but experience over the past few years has told me, that acquiring tickets to his slots at the Edinburgh Festival is an almost impossible task.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney