CityLife

Eddie Izzard: Stripped

Eddie Izzard delighted the MEN Arena crowd

Eddie Izzard
MEN Arena
November 7, 2009

HAD Eddie Izzard not opted for a life on stage weaving weird and wonderful tales of human progress into curious narratives about banjo playing badgers and jam, he would surely have been the greatest children’s storyteller ever born.

So fantastical are his stand-up routines – loosely scripted and surrounded by a net of ad-libbed material – that there are times when he loses himself in the garbled nonsense of it all, let alone the crowd.

But then, that is and always has been Izzard’s schtick – albeit a characteristic that on previous tours (in particularly 2003’s Sexie, the show he brought to the M.E.N Arena last time he visited Manchester) has allowed him to get away with comic blue murder.

Fortunately, Stripped is the moment Izzard has taken a fresh aim. The premise is an analysis of the various accounts of the history of time – starting as the Biblical and scientific views on the beginning through to the stone and civilised ages – in the kind of indulgently imaginative way only he knows how.

His main focus is God. A cheap pot-shot, you might say, but his humorous and confrontational approach to this is what makes the material special.

Meandering

Why leave the earth to plants and dinosaurs for 4,950m years if God created it so perfectly after seven days? And why not start the Bible with, ‘God created the earth. It’s round. Don’t mess it up’ to save thousands of people being flogged to death as heretics?

It is Izzard’s combination of script and mime that has made him a comic superstar, and Stripped has some of his best mime moments: as an appendix desperately seeking grass on the way down the oesophagus, a sheepish Nazi slipping off his swastika armband after watching Hitler’s head being flicked off by God, and his Spartan soldier dragging himself up and down a 20 foot spear with regrettable side effects.

The more bizarre the material gets, the better the mimes get and the more Izzard’s place as the king of absurdist comedy is cemented. The concept of pre-language scrabble (“Astinclamistivamblvus,” he splutters. “107 on a double word square.”) or his jazz chicken, fitted with a trumpet to improve its unpleasant croak, are two of the best of this, the first of two nights here.

His depiction of the weavers of the Bayeux Tapestry as medieval photojournalists, stitching the scene from the sidelines, is genuine gold, while his skit on giraffes who, cursed with an ability to scream at approaching tigers, can only resort to the terribly British way of raising the alarm with a polite cough or a game of charades is his finest hour.

A meandering tale on the moon landings seems like an inappropriate end to it all, but it’s neatly tied up with a story that brings in all the show’s strangest characters – from a pork-pie hat wearing raptor to a squirrel who survived the horrors of the Ark.

A return to form has been a long time coming. But there’s nothing like leaving people waiting.