‘This is my last tour before politics,” says Eddie Izzard, who plans to stand as an MP at the next election. Will comedy miss him? There are moments of vintage Izzard in Wunderbar, as tigers pause to pray before hunting their dinner, and William the Conqueror learns krav maga. But they get lost amid a superfluity of waffle. And there’s a weird dissonance between all this featherlight surrealism and Izzard’s save-the-world ambitions, which at his misjudged encore feel practically messianic.
It’s not his fault that the crowd applauds his platitudes about love versus hate and improving the global population’s life chances. But his rallying cries at the curtain call want for self-irony, while his theory of the universe that precedes it is less profound than he seems to think.
All of which might be easier to forgive in an otherwise tight comedy show. But Wunderbar isn’t that. It finds Izzard tracing the planet’s history (and scorning religion) “from the big bang to last Tuesday”, via dinosaurs on quiz shows, the first ever human conversation, and, er, a rumination on the superheroes we would get if other species were, like Bruce Wayne, crossed with a bat.
Each of those routines find Izzard in fine form, role-playing odd animal encounters in English and gobbledegook, following the thread of his fizzy logic and chortling at his own jokes. There are also rare forays into personal material – about his family, his marathons, his adventures in sea swimming. But in most cases, he needs to self-edit rather more strictly, both in the moment (does he need to articulate every thought that enters his head?) and across the span of the show, several of whose routines feel – even by Izzard’s standards – indulgent and inconsequential.
Izzard jokes more than once that this or that riff is for his own amusement. Certainly, over two-and-three-quarter hours, the show seldom feels as if it’s been honed to maximise public effect. Then comes that climactic tonal switchback, from frivolity to political piety. You could carve an excellent 75 minutes of comedy out of Wunderbar. But for now, it’s all a bit overblown.
• At Brighton Dome, 29 September. At King’s theatre, Glasgow, 2-6 October. Then touring until 16 November.
