Review by Steve Bennett

Maybe it’s because Eddie Izzard has championed French stand-up Yacine Belhousse as part of his unofficial comédie sans frontiers project, or maybe it’s because the ‘action transvestite’ himself is in the audience tonight, but it’s hard to avoid drawing parallels between the Parisian and his mentor.

His M.O. is to extrapolate the everyday into surreal anecdotes; the cost of a cheeseburger in Monaco sparking a epic and fanciful tale of what he really expects for his €35, for example. The payoff to another routine – ‘I don’t want an iPhone 5, I want chit-chat’ – could have come straight out of a classic Izzard bit.

In other ‘sketches’, as he calls them, he imagines what a Gallic superhero would be like and acts out the particularly valorous death of a chicken. Anthropomorphism is a recurring theme, especially effective when he imagines animals doing stand-up.

This is the first time he’s performed in English (so sorry for using a word like ‘anthropomorphism’, Yacine) and as when Izzard first performed in French, Belhousse’s stumbles in the language become part of the shtick. He’s developed an inventive workaround for those tricky past participles and when he drops what must seem to him like a particularly obscure English colloquialism, he gets an applause break, as a delighted grin spreads across his hugely expressive face.

It’s symptomatic of an irresistibly winning delivery. Forget the insouciant French stereotype, he’s smiley, impish and a little camp, ducking and diving as he works, putting a physical rhythm to the vocal one, injecting witty routines with a great performance energy.

He cheekily challenges many national archetypes, as he must, imagining a movie where we can use up all the clichés and never return to them again… perhaps a case of having his gateau and eating it, but funny nonetheless. And he tells how Paris isn’t quite the city of romance and beauty in all of its arrondissements.

Belhousse imagines himself a tiny counterattack to the volley of British and American cultural missiles raining down on France, which is probably accurate. But with a English debut as assured, playful and funny as this, let’s hope it’s just the first of several incursions. Encore!

Review date: 11 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett