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Eddie Izzard - Stripped

Published Friday 21 November 2008 at 11:15 by Paul Vale

Searing disco spotlights pierce the mist on stage and the music cranks up a few decibels as the lights begin to spin and twist about the stage.

No, it is not planned transfer of Never Forget to the Lyric and before the effect becomes too overpowering, Eddie Izzard steps out on stage, immediately receiving a warm welcome from an affectionate audience. In all honesty, the opening to this show is fairly lame, a fact that Izzard himself admits in the first few moments, but soon the familiar rambling begins and the threads for Stripped become apparent.

Barack Obama’s election to the Oval Office gets a nod but that’s old news and Izzard has bigger things to ponder. These include the existence of God, jazz chickens and when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

Izzard now gets a great deal of mileage out of his newly acquired atheist beliefs, which is a shame as some of his best early material included impressions of God. Now we must be content with minor biblical figures, such as Moses or Noah. To sum up, whilst touching upon the growth of civilization, Izzard questions why we are not more civil to one another. His meandering style, littered with digression and an assortment of oddball characters, defines him almost as much as his transvestitism, not that there was much evidence of this on stage. There were hints, however, to the future of The Riches, the series Izzard starred in with Minnie Driver in the US and its conclusion as a movie.

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