I bought a ticket to see Stewart Lee at Leeds Playhouse. Then covid arrived. So, two years late, comedian and public reconvened last night, to enjoy, as he put it, “a small window between the pandemic and the war”. I’ve been a fan for years, ever since he performed as a double act with Richard Herring. Since then he’s been on a rather contentious, high-risk career path for a comedian: first alienating his audience and then trying to win it back.
These days a performance includes mock outrage, self-depracation, complex 'call-backs', labyrinthine diversions, multi-layered misdirection, and a blurring of fact and fiction, while undermining our expectations of what constitutes a good night out in a provincial theatre. In playing a character called Stewart Lee, he deconstructs the art and craft of stand-up comedy, by giving a running commentary on what he’s doing, as he’s doing it. He’s done the same thing in book form, which is more fun to read than it sounds. “Within a few years,” he threatens, “‘jokes', as we comedians call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silences and passive-aggressive monotony”. I loved every minute.
The pic is of Market Weighton, visited today between the snow showers…
