Eddie Izzard performing Great Expectations – but why? That question hangs over the start of this one-woman dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s tale of spurned love and social mobility. But it gets forgotten fairly quickly as Izzard winds us in intelligently and expertly so that this familiar story casts its spell over us anew.
Out of the bounds of standup, Izzard stays a seductive performer, pacing the narration with no sense of rush and bringing a delicate physical comedy to the stage. Izzard makes the same circular movements as in one of her gigs, and with the same polyphony of voices, in conversation with each other – here ranging from a dithery young Pip to kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery and Miss Havisham’s cold-hearted charge, Estella, with whom he falls disastrously in love.
Under the direction of Selina Cadell, and following a first New York run, Izzard emerges oozing neo-Victorian chic (frilled shirt, velvet-lapelled jacked, bright red lips and nails) and perambulates Tom Piper’s set, which is styled with all the faded grandeur of Miss Havisham’s ancient home: red velvet curtains, dimmed lights, draped sheets and long shadows.
The script is adapted by Izzard’s brother, Mark Izzard, who distils the humour, lyricism and observational detail of Dickens’s text, though some lines are given playful twists. “Arse before wicket … it’s an old cricketing term,” says Izzard cheekily and sings “Pumblechook, Pumblechook rah rah rah” when that character comes on.
The many complexities around secret parentage are delivered with clarity and where the performance could so easily have drifted into parodic, cod-Dickensian, Bleak Expectations territory in the hands of a comedian, it retains its dramatic heart.
The comedy is always there nonetheless, helped by Dickens’s love of the exaggerated or comic grotesque. Humour is a language that Izzard uses instinctively, it seems, and it nestles subtly alongside the pathos. A story of identity in relation to social class as well as romantic rejection, Izzard encapsulates the former more keenly – the shame and snobbery of Pip’s rise in the world and his relationships with the convict turned benefactor Magwitch as well as humble Joe bringing the true, heart-tugging moments.
Some lines are archly said, notably one in which Pip is observed as a boy, repeated with just enough irony to turn it into a self-referential gender joke and Izzard’s own change of pronoun, but it comes with the lightest of touches.
Where Dickens’ story begins in Kent, before Pip’s change of fortunes take him to London, Izzard gives the working-class characters a Cornish sounding accent, with some muddle in voices as Izzard juggles between multiple characters but there is so much charisma there that it only amuses us more, and keeps us drawn in.
It is a moot point whether this show confirms Izzard’s credentials as a serious dramatic actor but what she certainly proves here is her unparalleled, really rather sublime, storytelling chops.
The answer to the question of “why”, meanwhile, is answered at the end: this production began as a pandemic project, finally realised now. But that “why” hardly matters. Izzard, ever running towards the new and challenging, turns it into a “why ever not?”
