Force arrives to spare his blusher
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie? Out, out, out is Caitlin Moran's advice to Eddie Izzard after his Brixton gig
The
Devil will never find work for Eddie Izzard's hands. Since August he has
done a 12-week run as Lenny Bruce in Lenny and acted the vest off every
other actor in the West End; he has toured the UK, taken the act to France
for a fortnight and done it nightly and insanely in French and tonight
he's here at the Brixton Academy, six hours off the Eurostar in a pair
of four-inch heels, negotiating the gigantic black fibreglass rose he
emerges from every night, without a day off in the past three months.
However, this battery-scheduling might explain why, on Sunday night, his show, Circle, was very much a creature of two halves. For the first hour, aside from a riff about the TV show Watchdog and a compelling mime of a man eating 168 bees and one accidental Sugar Puff, Izzard seemed to be struggling. He did not have the energy to fill the stage with his usual crowd of Old Testament characters, animals, actors who peaked in the 1970s and God, and instead attempted an unexpected and uninspired array of political material that depended, primarily, on saying rude things about Margaret Thatcher and General Pinochet, and rather desperately pointing out that despite labels like "German", "English", "French" and "Belgian, "We're all humans, aren't we?" This last was met with the only embarrassed silence that I've ever heard at an Eddie Izzard gig, and Izzard himself looked mortified. He's not a polemicist, but a one- man wardrobe to Narnia ñ and there's no magic in old Thatch jokes and Brussels.
After the intermission, however, Izzard comes across like a man who had had a spectacularly productive fag-break and thankfully forgotten all about the European Parliament. He took us through the 65 million years God spent between creating the dinosaurs and man; the disproportionate quietness of English movies ("lf you're eating popcorn you have to wait for a gravel scene. Oh, how you long for gravel'); how the Star Wars sagas have taught our kids to count "4,5,6,1,2,3. Except it's really just 4,5,6,1 ñ because 2 and 3 haven't been made yet', and gives humanity a new aphorism: "Everyone believes in sandwiches and cowardice. We just want to eat stuff and run away from bad people."
He peaks with the idle thought that the Death Star must have had a canteen, which leads to a bewildered Darth Vader trying to order but being flummoxed first by a tetchy dinner-lady ("You'll need a tray"); secondly by the tray being wet ("Has anyone got a spare tissue?); and thirdly by the blank refusal of the queue to let him back in once he has his tray. "I was here. I went to get a tray. Silence. Sulkily: "I could kill you all with a thought, you know."
At the end, about 12 people attempted an awkward standing ovation. While it was a drop-off from the screaming standathon Izzard used to get for the true genius of 1996's Definite Article gigs, it still felt appropriately Izzardesque.