Review: Steve Hughes: Big Issues – Newcastle Stand
Steve Hughes
For Steve Hughes and his support act Jason John Whitehead, a little rain and a broken car was never going to be enough to cancel their show at the Newcastle Stand tonight. The show, as they say, must go on.
Arriving on-stage an hour later than advertised, a windswept Whitehead fills us in on their arduous journey into Newcastle, gently ribbing corporate-hating nihilist Hughes for taking shelter from the storm in a nearby McDonald’s.
It’s a bright start, and certainly gets the more restless punters onside.
From here, Whitehead dips his toe into scripted material on Canadian and UK drinking habits that, on the surface, feels slightly pedestrian. However he squeezes every last laugh out of the observations with a charming ability to impersonate different cultural interactions.
It’s this same charm, and perceived innocence, that make the more sinister segments, like Whitehead’s penchant for ‘child tripping’, fly perhaps further than they should.
The darkness lingering under Whitehead’s material sets us up rather nicely for the main event, Steve Hughes – but it’s a fairly tepid opening from the typically sharp social commentator.
Over-observed rants on coffee shops, airplane toilets and hotel rooms feel forced, like Hughes is treading water rather than getting straight down to the big issues.
It’s not long, however, before Hughes is drawn to conspiracy theories and hard hitting commentary.
Hughes covers so much ground in Big Issues: climate change, Israel, health and safety, racism, reality TV, terrorism, drugs. Name any current world issue and he probably touches on it.
His talent for crafting humour out of such serious social issues is masterful, and even if you’re not hardwired in the same way as Hughes, his ability to enthral you with controversy whilst at the same time making you laugh is impressive.
You know Hughes is 100% serious, for example, when he proclaims that “we should take down corporations like McDonalds.” Yet he never lets the show descend into a rambling lecture.
His messages – while extreme and often swollen – are always intelligent. Hughes never fails to make you think, and when he hits with the laughs he hits hard.
But for me, social commentary is best served in short spurts, and once Hughes passes the hour mark the laughs seem to become more sporadic. At the close of the show he admits, “I never know how to end these things”, but Hughes had already missed at least three decent opportunities to close the show.
Instead, he ends on a bit of a whimper, which – rightly or wrongly – undermines the seductive rhetoric at play in this otherwise impressive show.
