Last night B. and I went to see Eddie Izzard's current touring show, Sexie, at the Millennium Arena in Cardiff. A horrible venue, frankly, resembling nothing so much as a bloody enormous church hall, but the show was excellent. It was the first time we'd seen Izzard live, but we own most of the videos of his previous shows, and he was certainly up to their standard.
That said, it is possible to spot ways in which his style has changed. I do admire the freshness of his very early stuff, Definite Article especially, and he has developed since then the mildly annoying habit of labouring his jokes slightly beyond the point where I find them funny. Since a lot of his material seems to be ad-libbed or improvised, and to change from night to night, it's possible this is a kind of destruct-testing process, attempting to indentify the tolerances of a particular item. (Certainly he makes a joke of pretending to write notes on how the audience reacts to certain lines, which may not be entirely a pretence.)
On the other hand, a lot of the audience seemed to find the recurrent repetitions funny in themselves -- thanks as much as anything to Izzard's remarkable comic delivery, I suspect -- so maybe I'm in a minority there.
This show also seemed to rely more on funny noises than previous material -- dentists' drills, exploding pilot fish, horses galloping very fast in Mexico -- but since Izzard's funny noises are very, very funny, that wasn't a problem.
By this point in his career, Izzard's transvestitism is pretty much incidental, but I have to say he looks very good indeed in fishnets and a split-thigh skirt. Not many men would have had the legs for it. He's also started wearing padded false breasts, which he makes look surprisingly dignified. (Unlike -- to pick a name at random -- Nicole Kidman, who'd probably look rather silly in them on account of already having breasts of her own.)
The first half was slower than the second, but by the end of the second I was in fits. The naturalness of his performance was remarkable -- his informal delivery and habit of paying almost indecently friendly attention to audience heckling makes the experience feel very like a conversation -- but it has to take a great deal of technical skill to build an audience up into an unrelenting climax like that.
In the second half, only the encore -- a reasonable impression of Christopher Walken, but without any funny material to go with it -- was disappointing. Although B. isn't a big fan of dentists' drills.
My favourite item was unfortunately indescribable, but it involved horses trying to climb a firemen's pole because they wanted to play canasta.
He is indeed a funny man. With tremendous legs.
