Review: Stewart Lee — Basic Lee
Newcastle Theatre Royal 14 April 2023
Stewart Lee broke his ankle a couple of months ago. He mentions this early on because of the stool standing behind him. It’s only there just in case he needs to take the weight off during the set otherwise the stage would only have contained the mic stand. It’s in keeping with the mood of the evening. Basic Lee, see? Stripped down. No frills or props: one man … or one woman … or one person, one audience, and one mic. He does talk in passing about previous use of props and stage dressing in his shows¹, and reveals that the very large shark he used for Snowflake / Tornado² (of which a little more later) had to go into storage as that tour was interrupted by the pandemic, and proved to be the single most expensive one-gag prop he’s ever had. No repeats of that this time.
Normally, Lee shows riff off a single overarching concept, but this tour is a little different, with no big concept (except there is really, sort of). It’s just a stand-up, with a mic, talking about how to do stand-up comedy. So that’s what he does.
Even though there isn’t a theme³, the first half is about “material”, and where it comes from. So the first topic he touches on is audience interaction. There are lots of latecomers entering the auditorium, and he starts to do what lots of comics do, and do the “audience interaction” thing, especially with those latecomers, expressing mock exasperation⁴ at how much they are sucking all the momentum out of his opening, which is vital for the rest of the show, so if it doesn’t work out, its all their fault.
“He never gets invited on panel shows.”
What follows is a short tour of the types of standup comedy, which include demonstrations of how to do Live at the Apollo if you’re a young comedian, how to laugh at your own jokes (hello, Kevin Bridges!) as well as ruling himself out as a panel show regular. Writing topical material is a pain, he says, when right now you’re on the third Conservative Prime Minister of the tour, but throws a couple of little gems in just because he can (“I can write this in my sleep.”). Other highlights of the first half include the widening of “one man, one mic”, and women in comedy; a JK Rowling section that you think he’s steering in a certain direction (“I’m not going there!”), before actually not steering it that way at all and giving it a nicely undercutting pay-off, and a small section about the Queen’s funeral and marmalade sandwiches, which leads nicely into some very funny Prince Andrew bits. You’ll never look at a Paddington Bear soft toy the same way again.
If the first half was about material, the second half is more about delivery, and how the comedian provides emotional depth.
He talks about the problems of doing TV specials, and how you’re at the mercy of events, like the death of the Queen leading to the second part of Snowflake/Tornado being pulled from the BBC2 schedule⁵. Out of curiosity he tuned in to see what they replaced him with, to see Keira Knightley getting her kit off in Collette. “It’s what she would have wanted”.
But quite a lot of the second half centres around a discussion of how Phoebe Waller-Bridge invented breaking the fourth wall in 2016 in Fleabag. Part of this includes him demonstrating to the audience how he performed stand-up material in his early career with no audience interaction or timing, facing the stage curtains, because no one ever looked at the audience before Fleabag. Except in music hall and variety, and everywhere else. But these were all far too proletarian, and needed someone frightfully posh to explain how clever it all was.
This dancing around the fourth wall actually gives him time to be more reflective and discursive, more so even than the usual metanarrative tricks he throws into most of his shows. There’s a certainly more than a hint of that during the section when he’s talking about his earlier years in stand-up, and fellow comics like Barry “Uncle Baz” Cryer⁶, Daniel Kitson, and Sean Lock.
And just to do the Toto pulling back the curtain trick properly, he again consciously plays with the fourth wall to signpost to the audience when he’s going to add the “emotional manipulative bit” to close the show fifteen minutes from the end. But amongst all of this there’s a passing discussion of “Stewart Lee”, the snarky comedian who thinks the audience are beneath him, and how that relates to Stewart Lee the actual performer, and how he’s still grateful that people come to see him, and give him (and the venues he performs in) a livelihood. Lots of us are still more than happy that he has, and that he continues to. Tonight, he seems, like all of us, to have had a lot of fun, and you can’t say more than that on a rainy night in Newcastle.
¹ So he mentions both Content Provider, with its reference to the Caspar David Friedrich painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, as well as Snowflake/Tornado.
² A thing I studiously avoided mentioning in the review I did, to avoid spoilers.
³ Except there is.
⁴ Mostly mock exasperation. They were letting people in pretty late, it has to be said.
⁵ Which did annoy me, as I was looking forward to it.
⁶ Which includes the last Uncle Baz birthday joke phone call he got. It was a good one. And he does use the stool for that.
