Review: Mark Steel at the People’s Assembly – Northern Stage, Newcastle
Following support from the sociopolitical skiffle trio ‘The Dead Peasants’ and stand-up poet Kate Fox, Mark Steel headlines tonight’s People’s Assembly anti-austerity benefit with the seamless professionalism we’ve all come to expect.
When I say seamless professionalism, his backdrop still shows Windows desktop and he unplugs his microphone the second he picks it up.
However he addresses this to the near-sellout crowd with the kind of confident ease that can only come from a lifetime’s experience of performing.
Much like his latest show, Mark Steel’s In Town, the set starts with some local material, displaying a keen knowledge of the city (a trick which Steel can now pull in most of Britain’s backwaters), and very skillfully leaning over the line between insult and jest.
He moves effortlessly on to the subject of age, addressing the fact that the anti-austerity movement he is here to champion should be a young person’s movement, and yet the very polite theatre audience at tonight’s show are distinctly of a certain age.
That being said, even the younger members of the audience can relate to Steel’s fury over technology we don’t need, the omnipresent call centre, the over-sexualisation of society, and the ubiquity of Tesco.
As the headline slot at an anti-austerity drive for Steel’s own People’s Assembly, this hour-long collection of material is less a coherent “set” and more a collation of Steel’s thoughts on a variety of subjects, all inevitably leading back to the political state of the nation.
Steel talks about his North East heroes, Thomas Hepburn and Harry Clasper, as well as indulging in his own brand of shouty satire, expertly weaving Karl Marx’s theory of alienation into the evening via a story from the late Linda Smith.
It is a rare treat to see a comedian who can take to a stage with such obvious freedom of material and grip an audience for over an hour.
Where some of his younger contemporaries work a crowd with tester material, and need a clear idea of where each routine is going, Mark Steel is a highly practiced and skilled comic who can intuitively sense the level of a room without any tricks or gimmicks, making for a highly enjoyable experience.
Date of live review: Thursday 31 October 2013
