Not long ago, Eddie Izzard was a TV refusenik, ploughing a cultish furrow on the stand-up circuit. Now he's a screen star and national treasure. The vast numbers attending his current tour attest that a joker in a dress no longer seems edgy or alternative. Neither does Izzard's material, which continues to mix nonsense reveries, talking animals and idle erudition to entertaining if inconsequential effect.
Sexie, his first show in four years, finds Izzard in effortlessly louche form. In scarlet corset and black fishnets, he opens with a routine about his false breasts exploding on an aeroplane. In the first act alone, his wittering encompasses Greek myth, firefighting, fly-swatting with the Guardian and Gregorian monks. But this channel-hopping restlessness leaves some promising riffs, such a skit on Noah's Ark, underdeveloped.
To a certain extent, Izzard is coasting. He has found a comic formula that delights punters by the thousand and, because it has so little purchase on reality, offends nobody. He may feign to believe, in recurring asides, that his material is "too weird" for his audience. But it isn't. It's just how they like it.
He's at his best when his routines most resemble full-blown one-man mini-dramas, with Izzard playing all the characters. A banal observation about visiting the dentist morphs into a horrendous symphony of buzzing, hacking and screaming. At such moments, he stretches himself beyond offhand wackiness, and finds a form that can fill an arena space.
Perhaps that's the challenge facing the grown-up, grown-famous Izzard, whose flights of fancy, no matter the freewheeling aplomb with which they're accomplished, now seem insufficient. The performer is more interesting than his zany material permits. There are fleeting references to his own life (his birth in Yemen; movies he's recently made) which, amid the non sequiturs and noisy animals, you long to hear more of. Like his false breasts, much of Izzard's material is cosmetically pleasing, but ultimately insubstantial.
· At NIA, Birmingham, tonight. Box office: 0121-780 4141. Then touring.
