By DARYL JUNG

Eddie Izzard, Britain's cross-dressing answer to Robin Williams, bounds into the Barristers bar in the Toronto Hilton -- without his trademark garish makeup -- deliberating on what kind of cigarettes to buy.

He figures they ought to be Canadian. Sticking with his own brand, he's convinced, would undermine his compulsion to experience North American culture to the fullest. He likes to personalize his act for the various regional sets of unsuspecting masses.

A practitioner of surreal, spontaneous stand-up and a burgeoning star of stage and screen, he's also fluent in French. He does his stand-up act for Parisians in their native tongue, which nobody else in the world does -- not even the French, for whom stand-up is an otherwise unknown quantity.

Best of all, Izzard is not "always on." But he's charming, articulate and sardonically funny all the same. And though he's been out as a transvestite for years, he's still surrounded by middle-brow misconceptions about his wardrobe choices that he takes in laid-back stride.

"Most transvestites are straight, essentially," says Izzard, in town to promote his stand next week at Bathurst Street Theatre in the next installment, Circle, of his cavalcade of one-man shows.

"We're not gay and we're not drag queens. And I still have to explain all of that, even though I'm not entirely sure how the sexuality works.

"In trying to get around it, I came up with the description 'male lesbian' or 'male tomboy.' And that's my best explanation of it. But then people say, 'Well, what the fuck is that all about?'"

That said -- any trouble getting girls while prancing about in drag?

"No, it's actually bizarrely helpful," he giggles. "I didn't think it would be when I first came out. Some women, obviously, have problems with it. But there are a whole lot of women who have the inverse of problems with it.

"They find it very positive, very fascinating and sexy, which is born out of the whole British glam rock thing. Girls were totally into Bowie and that lot. So it's not a problem.

"But what I get quite often is people insulting me and being fascinated at the same time. They are negative and positive right in the same space, which I understand.

"They have their own narrow lives and are looking for anything out of the ordinary to lay into. Then they feel better about themselves. They can say, 'Look! There's a fuckin' weirdo. I'm not a weirdo, so I feel great.' It's just a closed, schoolyard mentality."

The title for the new tour, Circle, comes from his idea that everything in the world is is spherical, including his material. Other than that, he admits, it has nothing to do with the show, which, like all his stand-up spectaculars, is a constant stream-of consciousness work-in-progress.

"I just go on and talk crap," says Izzard. "I'm very lazy and that has caused me problems with the theatre and films. Doing them, you really have to do the research up front. You gotta get in there and know the back story of the characters so when you do a scene you know where that character is going.

"My stand-up style works against that. I do the research on the spot, a lot of the time by asking the audience questions. So I have to work a lot harder to do film stuff -- which is a good thing, because it means there's no free ride."

Among Izzard's seven "small films" are such gems as The Secret Agent (with Williams), Mystery Men, The Avengers and Velvet Goldmine. He also starred as Lenny Bruce in the London West End production of Peter Hall's Lenny.

He's hip to the idea that it's hard to imagine the good-natured Izzard playing such a heavy role. But his reviews were raves, and he's doing it again off Broadway next spring, despite his fear of a "knackering" six-month commitment.

"Doing Lenny was great," he laughs. "And it was fuckin' difficult. I love to ad lib like Lenny did, and I learned his style. But his earlier stuff was more surreal, so I was also able to ad lib in my own style.

"But you think of him as much more political and angry. In the end he was just reading court transcripts while off his fuckin' face. It was great, though, because it gave me a chance to do serious acting and comedy at the same time. And no stand-up has ever played Lenny."

But a blond English transvestite portraying a legendary Long Island Jew? A stretch, for sure.

"Yeah, it is very wrong," he says. "The critics'll all want to kill me. But being a transvestite helps, I think. It's so wrong it could be right. It's so American in that way."

Auckland Town Hall
Review: Greg Dixon

What is Auck? Is it an Auck? Is it the sort of Orc found in The Lord Of The Rings?

British comedian Eddie Izzard hasn't a blimmin' clue - nor for that matter did his audience at last night's first of three concerts in Auckland.

Trouble is the "Auck" thing is something of a tried-and-failed gag in these here parts. It's the sort of joke that must spring immediately to desperate comic minds as they roll up to the arrival terminal at Auckland Airport for the very first time. It's the sort of joke that can die a death.

Not, however, for Izzard. It is perhaps a measure of his comic tenacity that he can repeatedly milk a gag, a one-liner, a gesture for all it is worth and make it steal laughs again and again.

And his 21/2-hour performance - a series of digressions upon digressions - was littered with such curious and potentially unappealing bons mots.

On paper, of course, they make no sense: a monkey shooting people just sounds stupid; noting the audience's lack of response on an imaginary pad sounds cheap; forgetting what you're going to say next sounds contrived.

Izzard's talent is at once all of these things, but his timing, his sense of his audience and his anarchic, stream-of-consciousness style somehow makes it work.

Mostly it is a style without punchlines, more ramblings on a theme, riffing on an idea, a situation or perhaps a word. He weaves them all - sometimes successfully, sometimes not - into sprawling epic gags with no natural ending or just sudden stops. He doesn't seem to care.

Yet Izzard is the master of the one-liner, too.

On the Pope apologising for the Inquisition: "What was it? The Spanish Casual Conversation."

On mad-cow disease: "Then cows gave it to people. Margaret Thatcher was the first."

On the Queen Mother: "She's been 99 for 12 years. The royal family aren't Y2K compliant."

Izzard may well be famous for being England's most famous transvestite comedian (although he wasn't wearing a dress for his first New Zealand gig). But he's much more than that.

An Auck, perhaps? No. Just funny.

Everybody loves Eddie Izzard, and Eddie Izzard pretty much loves everybody. But, wonders Paul Byrne, is he really still as funny as he used to be?

I remember the first time I caught Eddie Izzard doing his stand-up. It hit me the same way happening upon an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus hit me as a teenager. Or catching sight of Gary Larson's strip The Far Side amidst all the Garfield and Love Is… dross in my Dad's newspaper. Nonsense, when given as much significance as common sense, can be a wonderfully hilarious thing. And Eddie Izzard waffling on about cats drilling behind the sofa, Spock and co putting their phasers on a Sudden Interest In Botany setting, or pears waiting patiently for you to leave the room so they can quickly turn to mush, all made for perfect nonsense.

But like Python (who have officially handed their baton onto Izzard) and Larson's The Far Side, there's always a danger that sustained wackiness can eventually become tiresome and tired, that what was once nonsense gradually becomes someone merely going through the commotions. For Izzard, who has painstakingly built up an enormous following through his yearly tours and sly marketing (the last four tours all coming with an accompanying video and CD, available in the foyer), the desire to be "as big as U2" - as he said to me in 1994 - has not diminished. But isn't he due an audience backlash, a been-there-heard-that stare from the front row?

"There's always that danger, sure, that audiences will overdose on your humour," offers the 37-year old comedian. "But that's something you really have no control over. All you can do is try and keep the material as fresh and interesting as possible. I am very particular about each new tour being a completely new show. It usually takes a few dates to iron everything out, to explore the various avenues a subject offers up, but by the time I get to Ireland on this tour, it should be in pretty good shape. So hopefully, there won't be too many people yawning. Unless they've just been to see me the week before, of course."

Having just completed a well-received six-week run at London's Queen Theatre as the late American political comedian Lenny Bruce in Julian Barry's Lenny, Izzard has also been busy in recent months adding a few more films to his burgeoning acting CV. His early film choices – The Avengers, The Secret Agent and Velvet Goldmine – hardly reflect his film buffery though.

"Well, you must know that when you get involved in a project," offers Izzard, "no one can tell if it's going to work or not. You don't go into a film thinking, well, this is going to be a flop, but hey, it'll be good experience for me. I'm only the supporting actor in these films, after all. I tend to go into subjects that interest me, and even during stand-up, I'm constantly re-editing my material every night until I find what the audience likes most. With a film, so much editing can happen between the script, the shoot, the actual editing suite, the test screenings. There are so many opportunities for it to go wrong."

Izzard is a little bit more optimistic about his upcoming projects though.

"I've just done the dubbing for Shadow Of A Vampire with John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe, and when I read it I thought, God, this is a good premise. Really spooky. And then when I learnt that these two guys were attached to it, I was hooked, even though I didn't get the part that I wanted to get. So I think that one's going to be interesting. It's the making of Nosferatu, with Malkovich playing the director, FW Marnau, and Dafoe playing Max Schreck, the vampyre character. Also, there's The Circus, a great script again. Pulp Fiction meets The Long Good Friday. And then there's The Criminal, quite dark, which won't be huge probably, but I think it will do well critically. It's a first time director, Julian Simpson, and when I talked to him, he seemed to know his stuff."

Accepting that his profile as a stand-up comedian is something of a hindrance when it comes to acting, Izzard also agrees that his playing a stand-up comedian in Lenny is a bit like Bowie playing the alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Typecasting, anyone?

"Yeah, maybe I will have to sit on comedy for a while," smiles Izzard, "not do it for a few years, so that people only see me in straight pictures for a while. I might have to do something like that. But I'm in a better position than I would be had I done a big television series or something like that. And I have tried to avoid doing comedy on screen, except for Mystery Men, which hasn't come out over here yet. I was told that strategically it was a good move, having just done a tour in America and then having a Hollywood film out there. But I wasn't crazy about the idea of doing a comedy until I realised that Ben Stiller was taking his character very seriously. And I thought, actually, that's how I can get around this. Get dramatic, get straight, even though my character will be talking complete crap. I think after Lenny I have a few cards on the table though, in that I was able to play a serious part and get good reviews for it."

A self-confessed workaholic, Izzard's gradual conquering of his native England and then Ireland and the rest of Europe (delivering his shows in France in almost-perfect French) has led to his setting his sights firmly America. Having already built up something of a cult following in New York, Izzard added San Francisco and LA to his Dress To Kill tour last year, both shows attracting a multitude of stars and publicity, with Robin Williams signing on as producer to help sales.

"Robin Williams came in to put his name over the title in San Francisco and LA, and he invited a lot of people along to the first night in San Francisco – which is where he lives – and Eric Idle invited a lot of people to a preview show in LA. There was George Harrison, Steve Martin, Carrie Fisher…"

Trying to make some of the world's most respected – and powerful – comedians laugh - some of them undoubtedly Izzard's early idols - must have been something of a surreal challenge?

"The thing about famous people is that they don't really react. I think they look around and see how everyone else is reacting. I think in LA they all probably knew each other; it was quite a quiet night. I really had to bash it into them. But I like that kind of pressure; it was good to get away from the laughing-hysterically-even-if-you-haven't-actually-said-anything-funny-yet reaction for a change. It's something I'm not actually getting on this tour either, which is great."

Given the amount of work and careful planning Izzard puts in to his plan to be as big as U2, does he feel closer to that goal now than four years ago?

"Well, I think it's already gone better than one could initially wish for, even though, ambition wise, I've always wanted to really break America. But doing things like the French shows, to do German and Italian shows, and Spanish shows, and to do a serious movie role are all right up there on the list of things that I want to do. So there's still a lot to go for. I don't think that I'm just trying to keep busy. I'd like to be less busy than I am really."

Having lost his mother at the age of five, Izzard has said of his stand-up shows that the audience serves as a "surrogate affection machine". Is that still the case?

"It's definitely like a base-level drug need. I have found that I can stop touring for a long while, because normally I'd finish a tour and feel this desperate need to get out there again as soon as possible. But I do think that base level need for an audience is there in many performers who come from a dysfunctional or single parent – or zero parent – family. I'm sure you could be adopted into a loving family, and everything would be fine. Madonna's mother died when she was six, and Orson Welles mother died when he was young. So you see similarities there, but that's usually the inspiration, the initial starting impetus."

Most comedians would naturally love to have the official Monty Python seal of approval on their career, but when Cleese and co invited Izzard along as an honorary member for their reunion show in Aspen in 1997 – referring to him on the posters as "The natural successor to us" – did he feel he then had a lot to live up to?

"No, I don't worry about it all. They have high standards, and I hope I have high standards. They've influenced me heavily, growing up, and I do stand-up in a way that I think they might have done stand-up, but the fact that I'm in a different medium means I don't really have to match them. I've met them all too and gotten to know them, and none of them disappointed, which can often be the case. So I don't find it at all absurd; it's just great. I used to sit in Camden Street and recite Python sketches, so this is just a joy."

Having rarely put a foot wrong in his career, Izzard stepped into a major pat a couple of years ago when his much-trumpeted TV-scripting debut, The Cows, proved a disaster. A wonderful idea on paper perhaps, but on celluloid, this was one joke – a family of cows living as humans - that wasn't very funny at all.

"That didn't work for a series of reasons. Normally programmes like that have a pilot, then a first series, before really starting to cook on the second series. We didn't have a run at it, and it just became this one-off special with a bizarre amount of publicity. It really should have come out quietly. And also the prosthetics for it, we needed something like Planet Of The Apes, but we only had a television budget, and we ended up with these huge bulky prosthetics. It was then that I thought animation might be the way to go with it. I haven't left it yet, because I do want to do a Simpsons, South Park, Ardman Animation kind of thing. Having decided not to do a TV series myself, an animated series would be ideal."

Finally, what does Izzard make of the recent boom in Irish stand-up comedy, with our native comedians currently snapping up awards and top TV series aplenty?

"Actually, I thought I predicted the wave, to be honest. I said to Ardal and Kevin and Barry, you should come over to London. I booked them in, and then I set them up with a television series, which didn't come off in the end, so I had to cancel the gigs, do them myself. But I knew it would work. I thought they would tear through once they came over though. I think they could tear a hole in New York too. Me first, though, please."

57 Theater, Boston, MA March 12th, 2000

If a comparison between the British Whose Line is it Anyway? and its pathetic and lugubrious American doppleganger hasn't significantly hammered home the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that England produces far better comedy than America, then seeing Eddie Izzard seals the deal. A British transvestite and star of stage and screen, Izzard has returned from his internationally acclaimed show, Dressed to Kill, with Circle, his new touring stand-up show with all the brilliance and oddities that make him a comic genius.

When Monty Python's John Cleese said Izzard is "the funniest man in England," he really wasn't kidding. Using a headset instead of a microphone stand, he freed himself to use as much of the stage as he cared to swagger around, brilliantly stumbling through a ridiculously funny stream-of-consciousness streamline of thoughts that shot off on more tangents than an anal-retentive geometry class. He discussed humpback whale lounge singers and Darth Vader's interactions with the Death Star's pasta, and often launched into acted-out renditions of his subject matter that took on so many characters that he occasionally lost track. Yet his quick and witty recovery only added to the entertainment of his regular routine, as Izzard could do no wrong; he held his hysterical audience by their funny bones from the get go.

Such a good time did Izzard have with his audience that he occasionally stopped to talk to them, and it was hard to tell what part of the show was rehearsed and what part was just falling out of his ass like an improvised fail-proof joke book. Either way, almost every sentence that came streaming out of his mouth was met with an unavoidable collective guffaw from his audience. His humor is somewhat political -- he truly hates Margaret Thatcher -- and overwhelmingly silly. Still, he could have thrown anything at his crowd and they would have loved it. He never missed.

The two hours of his stand up comedy extravaganza flew by depressingly fast, yet Izzard is never one to disappoint -- as silly as an encore for a comedian seems, he came back out for one last joke. Standing there on the simplistic stage of the 57 Theater wearing a largely toned-down outfit when compared with his normal, flashy attire, he explained the differences between the American and British dream. He then paused and said, "And in the words of General George S. Patton, 'That's a very large hat.' Goodnight." A strange notion to end on, but judging by the audience's standing ovation, Eddie Izzard's strangeness in comedy is just what they came for.

THE IZZARD KING

In 1996, Eddie Izzard burst onto the U.S. comedy scene after conquering the UK with his breathless, cerebral standup act -- not to mention his devastating silhouettes. With two Emmys in his pocket, and a role in the new film Shadow of the Vampire, he pauses here to tell our correspondent about acting with Willem Dafoe, going through customs and life as a male lesbian (or is it heterosexual transvestite?).

George Wayne: Gustav Von Wagenheim, your character in Shadow of the Vampire, provides much needed comic relief.

Eddie Izzard: I play a bad actor, and if I do that well, it's kind of worrying.

G.W. What about your relationship with the other actors? Especially Willem Dafoe, who is really something to see in this film.

E.I. When I met him on the set he was in full Nosferatu gear, looking really spooky And I thought, Shit, he's doing that full-Method New York Stuff. And then he turned around and said, "Hello, Eddie," with a cheery expression. And John Malkovich was very John Malkovich. It was quite weird being up a mountain in Luxembourg with those two, sitting in a tent. It was quite spooky film to shoot.

G.W. You obviously must get teased a lot about your last name.

E.I. No one actually teased me about it, except at school, and I'd always hit them. It's generally fine, except everyone thinks I'm from outer space.

G.W. Maybe not from outer space, but you are an eccentric Englishman who tends to favor wearing women's clothes.

E.I. It's been written down to eccentricity, but actually I'm just a transvestite, an ordinary, boring transvestite.

G.W. A boring transvestite. Talk about incongruous. You've defined ourself as a male lesbian who just happens to be heterosexual.

E.I. I I'm a male lesbian or a heterosexual transvestite.

G.W. When did you realize you liked wearing women's clothes?

E.I. When I was four. A kid down the road would wear his sister's clothes, and I remember thinking I would be up for that.

G.W. Have you ever thought about designing your own tranny wardrobe?

E.I. No, I would be crap at that. I think it's best to let other people design it.

G.W. A transvestite who just happens to be very butch. You are not a femme tranny at all.

E.I. I'm a cross between a butch and a femme lesbian.

G.W. You perform all over the world. Have you ever trolled the streets of New York in drag?

E.I. I go through customs and immigration wearing a skirt suit and knee boots. They'll check the computers and see that I'm a comedian. They always let me in.

G.W. What's the difference between the Eddie Izzard onstage and the Eddie Izzard at his Notting Hill home in his negligee?

E.I. Onstage it's a heightened version of me. I am kinda quieter and more boring offstage. I talk alot of crap onstage; offstage I don't talk so much crap.

G.W. Have you ever had an audience with the Queen?

E.I. No, I don't dig the monarchy. It's an antiquated idea. These people have a ton of cash, and they go around opening things. They are like locksmiths.

G.W. Are you currently with a significant other?

E.I. Yes I have a significant other, but I never talk about her much. I happen to be straight, and there is a girlfriend.

G.W. But you've also said you would consider having a sex-change operation.

E.I. Yes, then I would be just a lesbian. Does that make sense? I am a male lesbian--I have a bloke's body, but I'd be quite happy to be a woman who fancies other women.

G.W. Have you tried having sex with men?

E.I. I've mentally tried to think, Are there any blokes here that I am attracted to? And there are some blokes that I look at and think they are good-looking, but I'm not attracted to them. I don't want to have sex with them.

G.W. What is your favorite part of the anatomy?

E.I. Breasts. I'm definitely a breast transvestite.