US Edition
Review
If the Remix is Eddie Izzard’s stand-up swansong, it’s a noble failure
The comedian's decision to revisit four decades of comedy hits doesn't entirely pay off
While everyone expects grizzled rock stars to belt out their greatest hits, far fewer demand that their favourite comedians revisit old material. After all, what’s a punchline without its element of surprise? But Eddie Izzard – who has spent years translating and performing routines in French, German, Arabic and other languages – rarely ducks a challenge. For this latest (and indeed, if a campaign to become the next Labour MP for Brighton Pavilion is successful, last) stand-up tour, Izzard is revisiting almost four decades of rich, whimsical storytelling comedy.
Much has changed since the 1990s pinnacle of Izzard’s stand-up career, a period from which the majority of the evening’s material is drawn – not least the comedian’s adoption of female pronouns. Where once she attracted taunts and even physical scuffles for being transgender, these days she preaches tolerance and egalitarianism and receives a huge outpouring of love from her fans in return.
Amusingly, if less significantly, the recurring mime of languidly smoking that Izzard would often use to punctuate a moment of casual indifference, or convey a certain sexy sophisticated Europeanness, has been replaced with anxious, urgent, shallow drags on an invisible vape.
The show’s title, The Remix, is apt. Izzard, who is dyslexic, has never written material down: even routines that featured on recorded shows and subsequently became regarded as canonical (such as one riff on beekeeping; or another that imagines Noah as played by Sean Connery) were always in flux, different at every telling. So despite the evening’s countless crowd-pleasing nods to familiar lines and characters, it’s quite thrilling to see how gung-ho Izzard is about applying fresh gloss to the tried-and-tested gold, or beating it into an entirely new form altogether.
So is the show an unqualified success? Far from it. Izzard’s freewheeling, unregimented approach comes off the rails during an almost self-parodic sequence in which she struggles to explain Shirley Temple’s role in the Spartan Battle of Thermopylae. And too many of the signature Izzardian dialogues, in which she jumps between two bickering protagonists, simply dissolve into mumbling, half-formed incoherence. At such moments, she further tests the crowd’s indulgence by falling back on her trusty conceit of scribbling an imaginary note that the joke needs more work, cushioning against the flop.
On balance, though, if The Remix is a failure, it’s a noble one, with enough flashes of brilliance to justify the premise and reaffirm Izzard’s reputation as one of comedy’s true boundary-pushers. And it ends on a high, with a classic number about Darth Vader, his temper rising at the petty operational bureaucracy and jobsworth employees of the Death Star, that feels both vintage and, thanks to the addition of new lines, gloriously fresh; an Old Master sketch burnished with contemporary flourishes.
Now touring until Dec 5. Details: eddieizzard.com