THE self-styled action transvestite was off duty as a bearded Eddie Izzard stalked onto the stage in jeans and a tailcoat.

Fresh from Hollywood success, Izzard was back to his stand-up roots with his Strict Tour, which is soon set to transfer to London’s West End.

He was on great stream-of- consciousness form at his sell-out show in Monmouth.

His set was littered with characters such as Noah and his wife Margaret, cannabis-smoking assassins, the traumatised squirrel and a jazz chicken.

The crowd was watching a master stand-up comic at the peak of his talent, not even being thrown when logging on to Wikipedia with his 3G phone to look up Symonds Yat to discover that the man who wrote the web entry was in the audience.

Izzard’s scenes were big – religion, science and why we are all here, but he never veered into preachy agit prop – Izzard’s world of the absurd was enough to seduce any crowd to his ideas.

Beneath it all, there was a streak of humanism a mile wide in his thoughts.

Little wonder he left the stage to such rapturous applause.