Overview
Below is our review of Eddie Izzard's performance:
Dramatic music, authentic looking ye olde maps and a fancy swirling lightshow set the scene for Eddie Izzard to burst onto the Auckland stage on opening night of Stripped at the Civic theatre. Welcomed by a full house amped for a good laugh, Izzard set about explaining the finer details of the history of the world.
This veteran of the stand up comedy scene is known for performing with feminine touches such as lippy, eyeliner and high heels. But as the title of the show suggests, for this performance he greeted us in a relatively subdued manner – jeans, a t-shirt and black shoes, with just a hint of magic glimpsed in the red satin lining of his tailcoat.
After a mild bit of banter about a certain national emblem and men in black, he set off on a journey of creationism versus evolution and meandering tales designed to prove why God couldn't possibly exist. While I couldn't fault his delivery, some of the material in the first half didn't quite have the audience 'laughing out loud' as it were, and perhaps lacked a bit of spontaneity. I couldn't help pondering if this show, which he started performing in 2008, had lived past its use-by-date.
But thankfully, this was just a passing thought. While the audience was clearly made up of some slightly tough customers, Izzard soon loosened everybody up with that old trick of berating us when our laughter was a bit delayed with comments such as: "Yes, Auckland are starting to get it now" or pretending to write on his hand such things as: "Okay note to self, that joke only works in Paris."
This, along with a bit of audience participation, and we were away laughing. "They're solitary animals" shouted out one punter when Izzard puzzled over how to describe a group of giraffes. Momentarily taken off guard, he quickly included this "fact" into his story about how one giraffe standing over here and another unrelated giraffe over there might warn one another of approaching predators without actually being friends. You might just have to trust me, it was funny.
By the second half, Izzard was in top form and entertaining us all with tales of musical chickens, sharks with revolving eyes, crème brulee eating badgers and good old Steve, the stock name he used to describe every person in the story.
Leaving the theatre, it suddenly occurred to me why it was no mean feat that Izzard had eventually had the audience eating out of his hand. Not exactly what you'd expect after spending much of the evening listening to a man speaking gibberish in an effort to convey how earlier civilisations and animals may have communicated through-out the ages.
