Eddie revives the Lenny memory

by Nicholas de Jongh

When the lights go up on stage to reveal a naked Eddie Izzard lying sprawled near a lavatory, something both bold and implausible is at once exposed. I do not like to criticise an actor when stripped to his essentials. But at first sight it seems the cruellest cut of Peter Hall's most striking production that Mr Izzard, bizarrely cast as the Jewish-American comedian Lenny Bruce should challenge realism by flaunting his uncircumcised state.

Yet despite this little local difficulty Izzard triumphantly manages to suspend disbelief. His Lenny, who suffered a fatal overdose of American puritanism, pruderies and police harassment, proceeds to save and make the evening.
Julian Barry's play, premiered on Broadway in 1971 and filmed with Dustin Hoffman, has not worn well. It takes Izzard's star cabaret turn and William Dudley's imposing stage designs to disguise the play's threadbare state. Both the programme and an amplified voice at the close, when Lenny lies dead of a morphine overdose, roll call the obscenity charges, show closures and court cases to which he was subjected. But the play gives insufficient impression of what Bruce suffered.

This deadpan anarchist with his flock of raw expletives, mockery of organised religion and advocacy of unorganised sex, was, after all, forever up against conformist America.

The form of Barry's play is most exciting. He does away with chronological plod and grind. He scorns realism and carves a theatrical mosaic, whisking the action backwards and forwards until you hardly know where you are. Dudley's terrific set, with its wall of mirrors, and its photographed back projections, is a sort of dreamlike void where Lenny gives a crucial stand-up performance.

Eddie Izzard's lack of Jewishness doesn't hinder the play
In vain he pleads his innocence of obscenity charges, while David Ryall's nicely flummoxed judge forever tries to interrupt the comedian's stream of outrageousness. "Cocksucker" is the Bruce expletive that leaves the judge and upright, uptight America outraged.

These pleas serve as a cue for Lenny to slip into his club act. Once in the club mood, free-association sends the comedian even further away from the courtroom. The protracted convolutions of this jump-cut, almost filmic, over-long play are hard to follow. The age of Eisenhower and Kennedy are almost elided. Lenny's fraught relationship with his wife, a dejected stripper whom Elizabeth Berkley endows with lovely erotic languor and a true dancing talent, fades out. Lenny the play is best enjoyed, therefore, as Bruce's cabaret turns, regularly interrupted by the police.
Izzard, even with dyed black hair, looks no more Jewish than Blackpool rock. His plump, camp persona hardly conjures up the lean and hungry Bruce. But who wants photographic realism? Izzard's voice has the right American timbre. His quick-fire, vehement Lenny, forever scales the heights of nervous tension, lets loose his pent-up, mocking fury as he seems to ad lib and improvise his way through scathing turns.

His New York cardinal, for whom the second coming causes no end of a fluster or his grave introduction to bestiality - "Do you just eat the chicken?" - are culled from Bruce's old comic acts. "You have to give up masturbation and you can't do it gradually," he warns soulfully. More than 30 years on Izzard makes Bruce's ancient jokes seem vigorously young. And in a breathless finale, of scattered wits and witticism, as his final breakdown happens in the public glare and in between laughs, Izzard's Lenny achieves high pathos too.

back to articles