All roads lead to London's Queens Theatre this week where Eddie Izzard is giving the defining performance of his career as legendary satirist Lenny Bruce.

Mr Izzard holds our attention - with or without his clothes on!

Madonna, Sinead 'O'Connor and director John Schlesinger were just a few of the names at the preview of Peter Hall's production of the play, which also stars Elizabeth Berkley as his stripper wife.

People will talk about the full frontal nudity of Mr Izzard and Ms Berkley, but, frankly as with Nicole Camden and Iain Glenn in The Blue Room, it serves to illustrate a dramatic point - not to titillate. The play, which features a fabulous jazz-combo that performs for half-an-hour before the action begins, has just a 12 week run at the Shaftesbury Avenue theatre because Mr Izzard has already committed to a tour of his stand-up show. There has already been a flood of offers to bring it back into the West End and to visit provincial theatres. Broadway wants it too.

Robin Williams and his wife Marcia-a co-producer of Lenny - are likely to be at the official first night on August 9th.

When Eddie Izzard did his one man show in Greenwich Village last year the Williamses paid for him to perform in Los Angeles. When I last met Williams he hailed Izzard as 'the funniest man on the planet'.

Izzard gives us a sense of Bruce's jabbing hostility, despair and destruction. My colleague John Edwards, who saw Lenny Bruce perform in New York in the early sixties, told me he was 'probably the cleverest comic I've ever seen'.

Sure, but John hasn't seen Eddie Izzard giving the most phenomenal performance on the London stage and one that transcends his material.

Different kind of show I know, but if you don't get tickets now, you'll be queueing for ever, the way you have to for Mamma Mia.

Baz Bamigboye

Izzard's Bruce is all too real

WANT to see the late Lenny Bruce in the flesh? There were moments at the Queen's last night - for instance, when the founder of alternative comedy was having graphic sex with the stripper he briefly married, or when he finally shot his veins full of heroin, undressed and lay down beside a toilet to die - when Eddie Izzard's Lenny seemed very literally to be offering us that opportunity.

But Izzard also gives us the Bruce the world remembers. At the beginning of Julian Barry's Lenny, he bounces up to the mike, plumper than the original, but equally impish and at least as funny. And towards the end, he is very much the Bruce I once saw in Greenwich Village: grey-faced and incoherent, stoned and sad, and not very funny at all.

It's a fine performance, but the play itself sometimes seems even more cluttered than its confused and psychologically confusing subject demands. The pretence is that Bruce is remembering his life and re-enacting his numbers between his conviction for obscenity in the New York of 1964 and his death by drugs in 1966. Look at the cast of characters, and you find club owners and jazzmen, family members and cops, Daid Ryall as a judge, even James Hayes as an unnecessary Chinese waiter. With Peter Hall's production adding the occasional half-mask and other surreal effects to the mix, it isn't surprising you get a pretty cursory sense of Lenny's history.

Again, I wish that Barry, who rightly believes that Bruce was fundamentally serious and seriously misunderstood by officialdom, had given stage time to some of his more notable crusades, notably the one against capital punishment. But he is generous enough when it comes to recalling those sly, scathing attacks on puritanism and hypocrisy, religiosity, racism and sexual repression. And a black-haired Izzard skitters and sensuously lopes in front of a set that's half-nightclub, half-courtroom, offering us several of the acts that reverberated down the 1960s and have their echoes still.

There's the early skit on the Lone Ranger, who saves a town, makes a graceful exit, and is execrated by the rednecks who come to thank him because it emerges he's lone because he's gay. There's the celebrated defence of the male urge, unstoppable even when the man himself is maimed in a car accident and spots a pretty nurse among the dead and dying. Above all, there's the famous evocation of the arrival in St Patrick's Cathedral of Christ, Moses and attendant invalids, and Cardinal Spellman's nervous astonishment: "Look, you lepers, no offence, but just don't touch anything, OK?"

Izzard engineers these numbers with great skill, dealing effortlessly with hecklers both genuine and planted in the first-night audience. He also makes you see how and why Bruce offended many of his American contemporaries, not least by making their laws look bone-headed. But what surprised me last night was the extent to which his performance made it clear that those laws were not merely silly and funny.

Yes, I'll recall Izzard's subversive comedy, but even more his look and sound as he muttered and raged through an act that by 1965 had become embarrassingly self-pitying. If I'd been asked beforehand if the British comedian had the range to be plausibly shattered, demented, distraught, I'd have said, probably not. Now I know he is a better actor than I dared hope.

Izzard is making his second appearance in New York City, following a sold-out run at P.S. 122 last fall. His new show, which he is taking on what he describes as a "worldish" tour, is ideal for an era of shortening attention spans: The comedian runs through topics at such breakneck pace that words and ideas occasionally get backed up in his mouth like cars in a chain-reaction accident. His mind races and the audience struggles to keep up. Some of the laughter, in fact, seems self-congratulatory: "Aha, got that!"
He's topical without being political. One moment, he is a balmy Prince Philip, slandering a billion Chinese on an official visit; the next he is the Grim Reaper, discarding, in the name of progress, his scythe in favor of a power mower. The material flags only when Izzard broaches hackneyed subjects like elevator etiquette or the inefficiency of modern appliances. (Although he also demonstrates, in a hilarious bit about a surly pilot hoarding all the best cookies during the snack service, why the terrors of airline travel have remained a stand-up staple.)

Izzard's rapport with the audience is so visceral as to make some of the jokes seem minted on the spot. (It's clear, though, that many are actually tightly constructed.) Transitions are anathema to him; in fact, his entrance occurs practically in mid-sentence.

The comfort zone that all truly funny people create has been activated by Izzard in the upstairs theater at P.S. 122. "Why did I call you all here?" he kids at one point. He really doesn't have to ask.