Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf review - fur flies as the beast is unleashed
It's as improbable a show as we've any right to expect of a man 35 years into his career. The opening of its second act, which finds Lee in full werewolf costume, screaming unintelligibly into a microphone to a rock backing track, makes one wonder if he's staging his own midlife crisis. But no: this is no longer Stewart Lee, it's the Man-Wulf, a red-in-tooth-and-claw standup hawking bigotry and 'suck my dick' in a bad Noo Yawk accent. Just as unlikely is the following sequence, when Lee, new identity now abandoned, treats us to the slapstick spectacle of a knackered man in an outsized wolf suit struggling to mount a swivel stool.
Lee as Mr Bean? Lee as Joe Rogan? The surprising new guises just keep coming. In response to the question 'Where are all the tough good guys?', there follows a section workshopping what touchy-feely liberal standup might look like if performed with shock-jock machismo. Well, as much machismo as a 56-year-old can muster when stood on stage in just a T-shirt, a pair of pants and a teensy prosthetic willy.
There's a lot going on, in short, at least after the interval – and the novelty of Lee throwing these ridiculous shapes is quite enough to carry us through to the show's more reflective coda. Which is just as well, because the joke, both of the faux-reactionary Man-Wulf and of his lefty counterpart, is fairly basic. There's more nuance, and more of the usual pleasure that comes with a Stewart Lee show – that twisty pleasure of working out what he's up to, and why – in act one, when normal Stew tees up his project with meta material about vampires, Gregg Wallace and an encounter with a model at an exhibition of the surrealist paintings of Ithell Colquhoun.
That anecdote posits an inner bully lurking behind Lee's bien pensant veneer, a conceit he returns to in the show's musical finale. The route there is circuitous, and deviates via more audience abuse, even more commentary on this or that joke's failure to land, than usual. It wouldn't be Stewart Lee (and tonight it's not always meant to be) if they were neatly packaged – but the ideas are rich in this lurid new show, which interrogates the worst evils of our nature, the left's scepticism of charisma, and the vexed relationship between cruelty and comedy.
At Oxford Playhouse until 8 February, then touring.
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