FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... EDDIE IZZARD

SUZY, THE FIRST NAME THAT THE PUBLIC EDDIE PERSONALLY AND PRIVATELY PREFERS, HAS RECENTLY OPENED A ONE-WOMAN VERSION OF "GREAT EXPECTATIONS" ON THE WEST END TO RAVE REVIEWS

(Above: Photo of Izzard by Linda Nyland in The Guardian in which Izzard, when asked about first names, remarked: “I think stay with ‘Eddie’ because that’s my public name. And I am gender-fluid. I don’t want to lose Eddie. What I don’t want is ‘Suzy Eddie’. But no one can make a mistake unless they call me ‘Kenneth’ or ‘Sabrina’.”)

Before I fell down a steep Metro station stairwell on Avenue des Champs-Élysées on my way to Orly after six months in London and Paris and broke my shoulder (which is why - along with the subsequent surgery once I flew back to America - these columns have momentarily slowed as I have), I saw Eddie Izzard at one of her favored Paris venues, La Nouvelle Seine, in one of her signature stream-of-consciousness monologues that are an amalgam of on-target one-off observational humor, heightened puns and punditry, erudite riffs, fanciful ribaldry, wry bemusement, and delirious conversational roundelays in which a fluidity of voices float about as they emerge from a febrile imagination that seems to be rooted in her larynx that has a need for neither a lid nor labels. A few days later, we had a conversational roundelay of our own over Zoom from my writer’s garret in the Eighth Arrondissement after she returned to England to prepare for her one-person show based on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations now running on the West End at the Garrick Theatre. Scheduled to close on July 1, the show, adapted by Izzard’s brother Mark Izzard and directed by Selina Cadell with sets by Tom Piper, has won raves.

Arifa Akbar, in one of them, wrote in The Guardian: “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. …

“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?’”

On Izzard’s official website it is written, “Hailed as the foremost stand up of a generation. Star of stage and screen. Tireless supporter of charity. Runner. Political campaigner. Fashion icon. Human. Eddie Izzard is all of these things and more.”

We talked a bit about the “more.”

QUESTION ONE

I first became aware of you in 1996 when I was interviewing Emma Thompson for the cover of Vanity Fair. One day after hanging out with her at her home in Hampstead and then on the Heath, she asked me what I had planned for that evening. I told her that I had no plans. She suggested I go see Eddie Izzard on the West End where you were appearing in a one-person show. She insisted I go see you and said I would thank her for the rest of my life. I obeyed her and bought a ticket to see you in Definite Articles. It opened with a giant book which itself opened up and you were sitting there surrounded by Chekhov and Lewis Carroll and Marlowe and Shakespeare, all of which you riffed upon. Have you been aware of the, well, narrative arc from that show to the one you're now doing based on Dickens?

It is an interesting thing because I've always been intimidated by literature because of its initially having been written and my being severely atypically dyslexic.

Of course you would be atypically so; you're fluidly literate.

I do approach my stand-up “writing” without writing it in its conversational way. When Selena, my director was talking to my brother Mark, who adapted the Dickens, while we were still doing rehearsals - in fact, this was on in another rehearsal because I have a one-woman Hamlet ready to go up after the Dickens - she said she was not writing notes and my brother said, “No, Eddie doesn't take [written] notes.” And I don't. I have to get them into my head or else I have to put them down and put them back in my head, so I might as well assimilate them straight into my brain and I can have them on the stage instead of having to look down at something to remember what I am supposed to do and try to pull it back into my body. I am approaching literature in a dyslexic away to a certain extent.

Because of the way you just described it, I assume it is slightly different each night when you perform it.

It is actually slightly different. My tour manager, Sarah, was backing me up on-book in case I lost a line and I said, “Let's not bother with that anymore; let's just go off.” And there then being no one having to check each line frees me up to do more interesting things. I thought if I come off-the-rails, I'll just have to wander with Dickensian English back onto-the-rails. So I do do that. There are certain words you can't use that sound very modern. If you say, “Okay,” in Dickens, it sounds wrong. But if you say, “All right,” that sounds okay. 

You’re doing it now - riffing between the rails.

I will ad lib a bit of my own invention just to get the character to take the journey back to-the-rails.

QUESTION TWO

Okay.  I mean, all right. You have worked with David Mamet twice in his plays The Cryptogram on the West End and Race on Broadway. He has become a rather well-known virulently conservative curmudgeon, so much so it has ironically become performative in the way he detests in the acting of others. You are well known for your progressive Labor politics. You've even run for office as a Labor candidate to be a member of Parliament from Sheffield Central. What is it like for you as an artist to work with another artist whose politics are in such opposition to your own?

Well he wasn't so conservative back then. He was beginning to feel conservative but it didn't really come out in the course of rehearsing those plays

But you are a political animal. You're very political

I don't know if I would use the word “very,” but I am political. “Very” makes it sound as if I inhale politics all the time. I don’t do that. I have a macro view that everyone in the world deserves a better chance in life and that is overtly political.

And yet even your presence as a person could be interpreted as a political statement.

By “presence,” how do you mean? Could you explain or expound on that?

The public Eddie Izzard who chooses privately and personally to be called Suzy and prefers the pronoun “she” and bills her evening of Dickens as a one-woman show has now, in 2023 because of the opposition to those choices from the right-wing, become political. Or there is yet another choice: it is just simply who you are without the patina of politics overlaying it.

Yeah, it's just who I am. I mean, I've been out for 38 years. How much notice do people need? Is it 40 years? Is that the Sweet Spot? 39? Or is it 37 years? People have just been catching up. I realize though when I came out in ‘85 trans people were called TV’s. The language has changed

Semantics are important - maybe even political, whether they be very political or overtly so. Words, as you pointed out, are the matter that matters. Your comedy is deeply, playfully conscious of that. You’re brilliant at it.

It's like African-American people. It was once “Negro.” I think it went through “Colored.” And African-American people said, “No, these are better terms.” We've been through different things, but this is me just saying it is me. I am gender-fluid. Now a lot of people in the world - I am hopeful a majority - are thinking that we're all somewhere on the spectrum. That whole binary thing has always been bullshit - but no one was admitting it

So it sounds as if you're comfortable with being thought of as non-binary. 

It's not what I apply to myself. I just say I'm gender-fluid. There's a lot of different terms out there. People can use what they want, and good luck to them. But there is sort of this neo-fascism that's out there that's like the 1930s all over again doing hatred and fear. Yet you can also see what Rupert Murdoch is going through by paying three quarters of a billion dollars for saying, yes, we were lying and then going on television and saying we weren’t lying. It's bizarro what the extreme right will do. But most people, as I found campaigning around, are live-and-let-live, just carry on. Some people are transphobic, homophobic, LGBTQ-phobic. But their time will pass and things will move on. I've just been slowly, gradually getting on with my life. I don't feel I’m a political entity. What I did is not a political statement. I am fine-tuning where things are.

I've been wanting to be called Suzy since I was 10 years old. I could now put that in so I thought why don't I just add that into my name. So it's Suzy and it’s Eddie and it’s Izzard. But you choose one or the other and then you can make mistakes - so it's actually less political. 

I chose Suzy after seeing To Sir, with Love starring Sidney Poitier,  There is an actress named Suzy Kendall in that.  I liked the spelling of that. I liked the way it sounded. And I thought I'd be happy to be called that but I also thought that's not going to happen. But I've finally added that in because I just feel more at home being a trans woman now and yet I still have boy genetics - male genetics - and female genetics. If you try to define what it is - what is masculinity, what is femininity, the essence of being a man, the essence of being a woman - it's really hazy in there. Women are running countries. Women are in special forces. They're doing everything they’ve been denied the right to do for so many centuries.

I think you are what George Bernard Shaw said about Great Expectations: it is all of one piece and it is consistently truthful. You are George Bernard Shaw talking about Great Expectations. That's your own essence.

We have been living in a world where Trump is lying and Boris Johnson is lying - there’s just lying and lying and lying and lying and lying. Just one “Big Lie.” Hitler got away with it, they seem to think, so why don't we try it. Here’s another idea: why don't we just tell “The Truth.” This is what's going on, guys. I've been telling you the truth for 38 years now. But I assume we’re not just going to talk today about being trans.

(Above: Suzy Kendall in To Sir, with Love in 1967 for whom Suzy Eddie Izzard named herself.)

QUESTION THREE

Well, let this serve as a bridge back to the artful you. I’m not being glib about this. I’m deadly serious. Before COVID, you were announced to play George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway with Laurie Metcalf as Martha and Russell Tovey as Nick and Patsy Ferran as Honey. But because of your having scheduling conflicts, you were replaced by Rupert Everett and the production itself shut down after a few previews when all of Broadway did and never alas reopened. But I think you’d be a great Martha in a production of that play. Seriously. It would also engender, as it were, an interesting response from the Edward Albee estate since it does not look kindly on two males playing George and Martha. But you, gender-fluid, are a she and are more at home now in being a trans woman. Have you ever thought about playing Martha?

I understand where you’re going. I will play trans roles and I will play male roles. But I am not choosing to play females roles. But trans roles and a cis male in a role - that seems fair enough.

Martha could be trans. It would reverberate, in a way, with the play’s themes. But you’d be a great George, too. I hope one day that actually fits into your schedule.

Hmm.

QUESTION FOUR

We share a seminal experience of losing our mothers as very young children. I lost my mother at seven to cancer. You lost your mother at six. And now you are playing Pip as part of Great Expectations, one of the archetypical orphans in literature. How did that loss affect the rest of your life and inform it?

I think it made me a performer. Because she made a costume for a production in which I was playing a raven at a school in Wales called Oakleigh House in Swansea. It was a Christmas play. There’s a picture of me in a raven suit. I remember not being that bothered by it. I thought it was quite fun. Not that bothered. When Mum died all that affection disappeared - as you well know. It just disappears from your life. Then in January of 1970, which is a couple of years later, I saw a play and some kid was getting a positive reaction on the stage. It was a play by Christopher Fry, The Boy with a Cart. And I thought, I have to be doing this stuff. I remember it hitting me in that moment. I think it had to do with my substituting the audience’s affection for Mum’s affection. That has stayed with me ever since. And it just seemed a lot of fun to be up there to play another character. I pushed for it but I couldn’t get roles at school because maybe when I auditioned they gave me a script and said for me to sight read it and my sight reading would have been terrible being dyslexic. They would have thought I was not good from that. So I just never got the chance. But I just kept pushing and when I got to be 15 or 16 it started getting easier and I started getting some roles. But I do think it was something to do with Mum dying that is a big part of making me perform.

Also an interesting thing is that a loving mother might give unconditional love no matter what you do. But an audience gives conditional love. If you really do good work, they will say: this is good work. But if you only do okay work, they’ll go: hmm, not so much love today. So I quite like that equation. You’ve got to work hard to get the audience going and to love you.

I met a boy who was dragged to see Great Expectations when I was doing it on Broadway. He didn’t want to be there. He thought it was going to be a comedy version. Maybe he wasn’t a Dickens fan either. But he said it really worked for him. And I thought that was the perfect thing. Because people don’t know quite what I’m doing because I’m playing more than one character and changing physicality and the sound of my voice and everything. His reaction is exactly what I am hoping to get from people because I’m really busting a gut out there to physicalize it all and to encourage their imagination. If I get it right, their imaginations sing and it becomes an even better production than it already is.

(Above: Izzard in Great Expectations. Photo by Carol Rosegg)

QUESTION FIVE

One of the lines from Great Expectations is “We need never be ashamed of our tears.” When was the last time you cried - unashamedly?

Probably a few weeks ago. I am in touch with my emotions. So that’s good. Because I stopped crying when I was eleven. I had to rip it back open again - those signals in my brain - when I was nineteen. I saw a cat dying and I felt nothing about it and I thought I’d better look into that. Because I like pets and animals but I didn’t feel anything. I realized it was a survival technique for surviving boarding school.

Another quote from Great Expectations is “You are in every line I have ever read.” Name that “you” for you.

It’s only Mum who’s in every line I’ve ever read. That would be in a deep background way. I said this in my documentary, Believe. Sarah Townsend, its director, was saying that I was blocking things and not being very emotional in it. But there was a point where I worked out that I am trying to over-achieve so I could get through maybe to the other side where people pass on to so that Mum could possibly notice it. If it were good enough, Mum would notice it and I would get a message back. It would circle back to me somehow.

I do believe they are here with us. Look, I know you are an atheist and you yourself don’t believe that there is a Man or Woman or Transgender Being upstairs.

If you take care of the Floating Guy Who Is Doing All This, then the whole universe begins to make sense. There is a random nature to it. A huge fucking rock came out of space 65 million years ago that caused a mass extinction. There is a randomness to the way the universe works which is terrifying or …

Reassuring.

In the end it makes sense. How can you go from Obama to Trump? That doesn't make any sense.

That is random. Yes. My own random spiritual practice can be summed up as, “First there was Light. Then there was man who said, ‘Let there be God,’ who said, ‘Let there be Light.’” It’s all just narrative. You’re a narrative guy. I think your belief system is to believe in narrative.

I believe it all goes in and out - like heartbeats. Do you know the shifting plate system?

You’re speaking geologically now.

Yeah, yeah. All the plates come together at certain points in our existence and become a super-continent. Look up Pangaea and you’ll see it. Basically, they move all around and at certain times they cluster all together and every piece of land is one and then they start spinning off again and separating out. And I think that’s what happens with everything in the universe. The Big Bang goes all around the universe and then it comes back. Big Crunch. Big Band. Big Crunch. Big Bang. The universe is curved and everything is curved - all the planets, all the moons. Trajectories are curved. The galaxies are curved. The suns are curved. The universe is curved. The earth looks flat but, in fact, is curved. So I think it all just rolls around and goes on and on and on. No one is on the levers of control. Because if you put a Sentient Being on it then they are a really screwed-up Sentient Being.

I think of God as the ultimate transgender entity who is all genders. I do not like the gendering of God as a “He.” Don’t like it at all. I refer to God as “They.” But let’s curve this conversation back to Dickens who writes so beautifully about having one memorable day in one’s life. “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me,” he wrote in Great Expectations. “But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.” For you that memorable day is …

Well, the negative one is Mum dying. And the positive one is seeing The Boy with a Cart. The day I came out because that changed everything. I have a had lots of memorable days but coming out as trans was the biggest one because it was considered so toxic at the time. I was trying to get my career going. If my career had taken off earlier, then I wouldn’t have come out because I would have already been in “the machine.” I would have been too scared. But because nothing was happening - even though I don’t believe in The Floating God - made me think my fate was having to do that thing now. It made me braver. Coming out and dealing with all that hell at the time meant I could do other things. I could run marathons because I came out. I have a private pilot’s license. I learned to fly. I had been scared of flying. Controlling fear is something that it helped me with.

I admire your bravery and your dealing with fear with such grace. In fact, I have a framed question here on my desk that has been by your face next to my computer screen the whole time we’ve been talking: “How do you deal with fear in recovery?” So this is, yes, a grace note with which to end our conversation. Good luck at the Garrick during your run. Thank you for doing this. It’s been kind of you to make the time.

And Kevin: keep having fun in Paris.

Mindfully, not fearfully ...