Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Stewart Lee’s latest show boasts value for money as he delivered two hours and twenty minutes of largely new material, where he takes seemingly familiar subject matter to abstract and hilarious new territory.

Lee opened many of his segments at the Philharmonic Hall with an ostensibly simple and recognisable situation such as the affrontingly ignorant opening gambit of a cabbie (‘these days if you say you’re English, you get locked up and thrown in jail, don’t you?) He then deconstructs his subject through pain-staking repetition until it becomes something bigger. Suddenly one cabbie’s poorly thought through conversation starter becomes a signifier for the whole confused and restrictive notion of national identity which Lee then gently prods until it bursts at its incongruous seams before our eyes. At which point he takes it further with a satirical anecdote about a friend who didn’t know he was a Latvian despite appearing ‘like a racist caricature of a Latvian’ complete with ‘those Latvian shoes,’ which are just blood-soaked bales of hay with holes in.

Part of the pleasure of Lee’s style is that he doesn’t simply make the audience laugh, he takes them on an exploration of why things are funny – in this case his brilliantly bizarre imagery of Latvian stereotyping shows the tendency for prejudice, to grotesquely depict its subject until it bears no resemblance to reality; a treatment which Lee subverts to great effect as he become a parody of bigotry.

Elsewhere a similar technique of elaborate and repetitious deconstruction is used to send up a variety of subjects such as UKIP’s immigration stance. Lee traces the unwanted changes some of their members seem to  fear of immigrants from the Polish ‘coming over here and mending things’, through the pesky influx of Neolithic farming techniques all the way back to the inception of matter (‘I don’t remember being asked if I wanted a Big Bang’.)

The pertinence of Lee’s political satire comes from the skill with which he offsets his tireless logic against the irrational and contradictory opinions of some figures, reaching surreal comic heights in the process. Though Lee takes pleasure in admitting that the show is not a polished article (he says he wrote the twenty minute encore in his hotel room), this deliberately haphazard feel gives his intricately assembled ideas a spontaneous energy which contrasts with his arid delivery to create a thoroughly absorbing and achingly funny show.

Toby Hall