Brexit,Trump, DVDs and selfie sticks
Stewart Lee: Content Provider, Wales Millennium Centre
UNSHACKLED from his obligations to create content for his TV show, Stewart Lee is free to trample UK comedy and swat at the attacking planes of Brexit and Trump.
At the top of his fairly lofty pyramid of enemies is the angry red face of Lee himself.
“I’ve come to hate the character of Stewart Lee,” he tells us, bemoaning his difficult position between art and mortgage payments and you start to wonder if there’s more to it this time than usual.
Yet, he doesn’t hold back and somehow he still eviscerates enemies and popular culture alike, even destroying Game of Thrones (which he hasn’t seen) using only a HMV mug. Lee opened Content Provider explaining how he had originally wanted to do a show on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, a reflection of our fractured experience of modern life.
What we end up with is a show about the two monumental political events of the last year – Brexit and Trump. The latter opening the second half of the show in a sharply observed call back, a concept he has already hilariously explained for those at the back who “came with a friend”.
Not that he doesn’t manage to fit in his original goal too by way of a Four Yorkshiremen-esque voyage into what our grandparents had to go through to enjoy S&M and the fate of thirtysomethings more interested in the cartoon Japanese cat on bag than reality. Lee’s stage backdrop, a vast pile of comedy DVDs, at first looked like it might be a nest where a terrifying plastic-craving X-Files villain might sleep between murders. Its true purpose is to provide Lee with a chance to literally trample on other comedians’ DVD specials that he bought for a penny each online.
Thus we come full circle, it doesn’t matter what they say, Lee is on top form and managing the various threads of his topics and rants with masterful ease.
The tableau ending of the show is magnificent to behold, the inclusion of the selfie stick as a modern totem to spoil it may seem a little hoary, but I certainly couldn’t think of a better way of putting it. Matthew Trow