"Nobody can do me like I can do me," says the eponymous hero of Julian Barry's Lenny. Too true: the great comic spirit is unique. And, valiantly though Eddie Izzard tries, he cannot wholly recreate the shock-impact of a mordant New York Jewish satirist such as Lenny Bruce.
The real problem, however, lies in the form of Barry's 1971 play. It starts with Lenny, found guilty on obscenity charges, arguing his own case before an unusually tolerant judge: claiming that his act has been misrepresented, he takes him through the story of his life.
As a biographical device, it is clumsy: worse still, it means that we only hear Lenny's version of events. That he was persecuted by a hypocritical society is beyond doubt; but it means we never hear the whole story about his marriage, his professional misfortunes or the reasons for his increasing drug-dependency.
The main justification for the show is that it gives us large slices of Lenny's stage-act. It shows his modest beginnings doing lousy jokes and mediocre impersonations in dives. It then demonstrates his gradual emergence as a satiric monologist: one who saw it as his moral mission to tell the truth to a lying society. In one scene he posits the panic induced at St Patrick's cathedral in New York by the return to earth of Christ and Moses. In another he brings up the house lights and asks: "Are there any niggers in the club tonight?" He then goes on to calculate the number of spicks, micks and greaseballs present claiming: "It is suppression of the word that gives it its power."
Izzard is at his best in this moment of naked confrontation with the audience: suddenly you feel the frisson that Lenny himself must have induced in his nightclub audience. But Izzard is up against two problems. One is that every two-bit comic now prides him or herself on saying the supposedly unsayable: the threshold of what is publicly acceptable has been lowered since the 60s. The other difficulty is that Izzard is a natural charmer where Bruce clearly enjoyed an abrasive relationship with his audiences. What we see is a noble attempt to recreate the original Lenny that catches his delight in spiralling fantasy but that lacks the moral danger he must have possessed.
Peter Hall's production does its best to unify an inchoate play through the use of masks by the minor characters and through a William Dudley design that makes effective use of mirrored surfaces.
David Ryall as the judge, Elizabeth Berkley as Lenny's stripper wife and James Hayes as a succession of authority-figures lend good support. But what I got from the evening were echoes of Lenny's nightclub act and of the hysteria he induced in middle America, but only a fitful sense of his moral anger and dazzling, dangerous magnetism.
