If you’ve seen the 2009 documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, which includes a short section ridiculing her historical lack of fashion sense when it came to standard-issue guy clothes, you will recognise this as a sartorial leap forward.Ī lot of people have been wonderfully accepting, and young people are very open and great. Let the record show, though, that Izzard is not just fairly but magnificently tastefully put together. I mean, Marilyn Monroe wore a potato sack at one point in a photo shoot.” “If you are trans, it’s probably better to be fairly well put together,” she says, and sighs at the difference between taking meticulous care with her appearance and throwing on any old thing, as she says a person can do “if you look devastatingly feminine. On her feet are a stunning pair of tall, lace-up, high-heeled black boots: a part of her costume that she wants to get used to wearing. But that evening in early December, Izzard does, in a tailored black jacket over onyx tights, with a splash of colour in the few fluttery inches of floral-print skirt peeking out beneath the jacket hem. Almost no one looks glamorous, let alone devastatingly so. THEATRE REHEARSAL ROOMS are workaday spaces, and people tend to dress accordingly. Photograph: Josefina Santos/New York Times “I said, ‘This is exactly how Dickens planned it,’” she deadpans.Ĭharles Dickens’ Great Expectations: Eddie Izzard is playing all the parts in her New York production. It shows her in a red dress, doing Great Expectations for a socially distanced audience on a wind-whipped rooftop in the south of England, using a hand-held microphone. So I just pushed on.”īack in the rehearsal room, Eddie pulls out her phone and scrolls, seeking a photo from the summer of 2020: a time-capsule image of an early pandemic performance. “I went back and read the book and got started,” Mark says by phone, all practicality, “and found out later that Eddie was too busy to do anything. The streamlined adaptation is by her older brother, Mark Izzard, though when Eddie suggested the project to him, she meant for them to work on the script together. This staging of Great Expectations began with readings, too, as Izzard did what she calls work-in-progress performances, initially in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Izzard is fond of noting that the novelist would travel to New York to give public readings. But I didn’t actively have a campaign about it. “And I hope that Dickens might think it was okay.” “I love the fact that I’m playing male characters and female characters in this,” she says. In such multicharacter solo shows, Izzard finds her own gender fluidity helpful. “Drama is something I’ve always wanted to do from the beginning, and just went a long way round to get to it,” says Izzard, who lately has been preparing a one-woman Hamlet with Selina Cadell, who’s also the director of this show. Playing the orphaned Pip, the forsaken Miss Havisham, the alluring Estella, the desperate Magwitch and 15 or so others, she brings her own arch humour to a multiple-character technique that she ascribes not to some drama theorist but to the comedian Richard Pryor, a virtuoso of the crowded solo stage.Īt 60, she is ready to dig in – and to demonstrate what she’s capable of. In Great Expectations, which is now playing in Greenwich Village, Izzard pulls moments of levity from the very air. And I hope that Dickens might think it was okay I love the fact that I’m playing male characters and female characters in this. And however firmly she might draw a line between Eddie Izzard the stand-up and Eddie Izzard the actor – the British Broadway veteran who was a Tony Award nominee in 2003, for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg – they are of course one and the same, operating in different yet overlapping modes. Izzard has, after all, made her name in comedy. Still, even the way Izzard utters that sentence is funny: drily dismissive, with the briefest pause as she calculates the paltry figure. “There’s about four jokes in it,” she says. On an early-December evening in a rehearsal studio on the western edge of Manhattan’s garment district, Eddie Izzard is chatting about audience assumptions – that her solo performance of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations will be a comic take on the classic Victorian coming-of-age tale.
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