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A Room With A StewA Room With a Stew ★★★★★

By Will Robinson in FreshAir.org Posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2015

The Assembly Rooms audience don’t know quite what to make of Stewart Lee. The Edinburgh Fringe veteran has spent the best part of the last two decades inspiring both a dedicated following and an equally ardent opposition with his divisive and heavily ironic brand of tongue-in-cheek intellectual comedy.

Luckily, the dramatic difference of opinion towards him is something Lee revels in. In his 2015 show “A Room With A Stew”, a testing-ground for material for his upcoming Comedy Vehicle series, he makes full use of the divide, turning his 70-minute slot into the comedic equivalent of a Mexican stand-off.

He shows his hand early on in the performance, explicitly warning anyone watching him for the first time that his act doesn’t always represent his own beliefs. Instead, he suggests, he prefers to create a fictionalised caricature of himself to run in parallel with the surface humour, creating a narrative arc with greater depth and complexity than you’d expect at a usual top-tier stand-up show.

That’s not the way to impress an audience half-filled with people who already think you’re too intellectual. But, more like a conjuror than a comedian, throughout the show Lee relentlessly pulls off that most impressive feat of telling his audience it’s all smoke and mirrors but making them believe it regardless.

“A Room With A Stew” bears all the hallmarks of a classic Stewart Lee show: there’s heavy irony, excessive repetition and obscure cultural references, meandering off-piste segments that somehow weave their way seamlessly back into the narrative fabric, and off-mic tirades of abuse at an audience he insists is simply too slow to understand quite how clever he and his jokes are.

Lee is unlikely to win any new fans tonight, but it doesn’t look like he wants to either. It’s the show of a comedian who knows exactly who he and his audience are, and he’s not going to change that just because it’s not his usual crowd tonight. Instead, he pushes his method to breaking point, leaving the majority of the crowd wondering whether it’s even supposed to be funny anymore.

As ever, Lee’s good jokes are met with applause rather than laughs, but the response to his finest moments in “A Room With A Stew” is most often a stunned silence. If there’s one thing that unifies the crowd tonight, it’s that both Stewart Lee’s admirers and detractors will go home with their pre-existing opinions reinforced, shaking a clenched fist and shouting: ‘I told you so!’

Written by Will Robinson in FreshAir.org on 26th August 2015. Filed Under: A Room With A Stew, Edinburgh, Reviews, Series 4, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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