Oxford Playhouse
Morphing from shock-jock lupine to hand-wringing liberal, Lee lambasts the comedy of cruelty in scathing, slapstick style

‘Sick of comedy, sick of me, sick of my own thoughts.” That’s where we find comedy’s most esteemed curmudgeon at the start of his new show, Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf: disillusioned at the failure of progressive standup in a world dominated by “$60m Netflix comedians of hate”. What does the current ascendancy of Messrs Chappelle, Gervais, Burr – and indeed Trump – tell us about our relationship to comedy, to cruelty, to freedom of speech? To explore just that, Lee presents this new show in three parts, and through three personae: his normal “metropolitan liberal elite” self; an obnoxious shoot-from-the-hip alter ego; and some experimental combination of the two.

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.