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Eddie Izzard review – surreal, featherlight sugar on the pill of messianic politics

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The would-be MP’s ‘last’ standup show teems with delightful animals and gobbledook but often feels in need of an edit

‘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.

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