Eddie Izzard
Actor
FOR CONTAINING MULTITUDES
FEW PERFORMERS CAN LITerally go the distance the way Eddie Izzard can. In addition to being a barrier-breaking stand-up comic, Tony-nominated actor, noted polyglot, and budding politician, she also happens to be an accomplished long-distance runner, once completing 43 marathons (about 1,100 miles) in 51 days as part of a charity event.
That endurance no doubt came in handy last winter at off-broadway’s Greenwich House Theater, when Izzard took the stage for a solo production of Great Expectations, regarded as one of Charles Dickens’s densest and most mature works. The 61-year-old Izzard embodied 19 characters and churned through thousands of words of dialogue in the span of two hours (Izzard’s older brother, Mark, had condensed the novel into its own kind of marathon), all while packing the house, selling out an extended run, and winning raves from fussy New York drama critics. The production then transferred to London’s West End, and Izzard is already preparing a more ambitious follow-up: a solo production of Hamlet, which is in open rehearsals in London and could premiere in New York in January.
Izzard’s Great Expectations isn’t played for laughs. It began as a faithfully rendered audiobook for which Izzard, who describes herself as “severely atypically dyslexic,” hunkered down in a recording studio for weeks to recite what would be more than 20 hours of text. What made her stage performance a truly singular feat is how Izzard took a comedic technique and applied it to drama. She picked it up from Richard Pryor, who, in his classic 1979 concert film, performs extended bits of free-form dialogue, often lurching forward or turning his body as he assumes different personalities. “I’d been doing it in my stand-up for 25, 30 years,” Izzard says. “I got it from Richard.”