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Eddie izzard dpac7/25/2023 “I’ve been training myself to be able to speak Dickensian, 1800s-type speech. ![]() “Sometimes I do screw up a line to get to a word, and I need to go back and circle around,” Izzard said. She has even removed “the safety net” of her production manager following the script from the side of the stage, ready to prompt if needed. Slowly, she weaned herself off the script, memorizing more and more of it, learning the text from the back, until now she knows it all. Mark’s adaptation of Great Expectations began life at the Edinburgh Festival, with Izzard reading Dickens’ novel from the page, “like Jackanory on steroids,” as she put it-referring to the popular BBC storytelling series for children of the 1970s and ’80s. How could they get Python and not me? I was very influenced by Python.” She won two Primetime Emmys for her 1998 show, Dress to Kill. “After one show they were talking about me touring America. “Robin Williams said smart people would get it,” Izzard said of what was then known as alternative humor, which subsequently seeped into the cultural mainstream. Izzard recalled coming to New York in the mid-1990s, with people wondering if America would understand her sense of stand-up humor that the differences between American and British humor would be too great. 11 (The Greenwich House Theater, 27 Barrow Street), traversing genders, ages, and imagined locations on a relatively unadorned stage. She is performing Great Expectations, adapted by her older brother Mark-playing Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, Magwitch, and everyone else- until Feb. ![]() “It’s always good to be back in New York,” Izzard said, counting it among the cities she has come to think of as home. Through all challenges, Izzard said she had simply “carried on.” Her career in stand-up comedy and drama, on stage, TV and film, in marathon running and more recently in politics, is one of determined, blithe relentlessness-of doing things her way, and screw those who abuse, mock, or demean her. It was happily jolting, as Izzard, 60, had just been talking about the transphobic abuse she had received on the streets. A man walking by was half-waving, half-raising his arm in support and appreciation towards her. ![]() Mid-sentence as silence briefly reigned, Izzard looked past this reporter’s face, and smiled. New York City will always do New York City, and so as Eddie Izzard drank from a cup of black coffee talking about playing every character in a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the most effective ways to conquer transphobia, and her plans for a one-woman Hamlet, a familiar sonic cavalcade of siren upon siren-fire engines, ambulances, police cars-passed by our restaurant.
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