by Sarah Cope

Isy Suttie is best known as Dobby from the Channel 4 Mitchell and Webb sitcom Peep Show. Her performance in that well-regarded comedy has always been a highlight for me, and her one-woman show didn’t disappoint. Playing four characters (“basically because there are four accents I can do”) she tells (and sings) the story of Lisa from Matlock (where Suttie is originally from) and works in Somerfield.

The little, mundane details of life and love are where Suttie finds much of her humour, and also in absurd moments, such as when Lisa meets Carl, a shelf-stacker, who is so weak from his vegan diet he cannot lift a magazine. Suttie voicing Carl’s gruff accent was one of the highlights of the show – think Jonny Vegas. “I don’t like making decisions,” she/he sings, “and there’s a lot less to choose from with vegan provisions.”

The third character is Valerie Mackerie, “the only actress in the country to have only played fairy godmothers.” This was perhaps the least successful of the four characters, the final one being Mary Westenberger, a singer from the US, which allows Suttie to do in an incredible – and hilarious – Alanis Morissette impression, illustrating the strength and versatility of her voice. Indeed, Suttie’s seamless incorporation of songs into her routine – always a risky strategy for a comedian – brought to mind Victoria Wood, but with a guitar rather than a piano. And that’s quite an accolade.

Suttie rounded off the evening with a song about the modern dating game, and she was perhaps at her strongest at this point. “There’s a million heartbreaks in a lowercase kiss”, she sings. With a lament about the problems of people getting to know each other online rather than in real life (“I know the shade of your knickers before the colour of your eyes”), Suttie concludes what has been on original and funny evening.

I should point out that the evening did not start well: Suttie’s warm-up act, Elis James, who took up the whole of the first half of the night, was beyond unfunny. One always knows that when a so- called ‘comedian’ has to resort to insulting the audience for 80% of their time on stage (one man apparently merited the comment “that dick doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on”), you know that they’re in the wrong game. Unlike Suttie, who shone. Go see her, but skip the first half.

Touring details.

By Robert Bain

When I last saw Stewart Lee perform in 2005, he was even more bitter than usual – worn down by the self-appointed defenders of religion who took issue with ‘blasphemous’ hit show Jerry Springer: The Opera.

The unlikely target of his vitriol was Joe Pasquale – who stands at the opposite end of the comic spectrum from the boundary-pushing Lee. After accusing Pasquale of plagiarising other comedians’ jokes, Lee spent considerable time building up to a punchline so vile, offensive and (if you believe in the concept) blasphemous, that Pasquale could never steal it.

It’s a relief to find Lee has calmed down somewhat in the intervening two years. However, one can surmise from this show’s title (a reference to a recent Channel 4 list programme) and that of his DVD, Stewart Lee: 90s Comedian, that he retains his unhealthy preoccupation with not being as famous as other, lesser, comics, or as famous than he once was himself.

As he points out, he’s pushing 40, it’s 17 years since he won a ‘New Act of the Year’ award, and yet he’s still playing a venue for ‘up and coming’ talent.
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