This wasn’t the Eddie Izzard we’ve been used to, writes Paul Fleckney
It’s all about the smirk, I swear. Eddie Izzard used to perform with this cheeky smirk on his face. There it would sit, pretty much permanently on his face, along with a glint in the eye, making everything alright. It’s not until I watched Force Majeure that I even thought about it, let alone recognised how central it was to his act, because now it’s gone, and I want it back, because with it has gone a lot of the charm that drove an Izzard show.
What I realise now is that the smirk was a tone-setter, and part of the sell of the jokes. It kept everything light and jolly. He smirked so we smirked, it made us like him and got us half way to a laugh already. It wasn’t cynical or deliberate, it was just how he was.
The Eddie Izzard that performed Force Majeure on Saturday night wasn’t the same person. Sure it was all there – the silliness, the vagueness, the gift for physical comedy, the faux-innocence, the self-commentary on his mimes, the range of reference, the smatterings of French, “Steve” and so on – but Izzard 2013 is an altogether more serious proposition.
This gravely undermined his stock-in-trade of whimsy and surrealism, which requires a certain lightness of being to pull off. Nothing undermines a mime of a dinosaur ghost quite like looking as if you’ve got half an eye on the Pakistani election result.
Politics is his new baby of course – as his recent interview with London is Funny will attest – but he (probably wisely) keeps politics largely out of Force Majeure. So what did he talk about? Well it was an impressive palette, as ever – topics included sacrifice, Clash of the Titans, Olympians, dressage (a pet favourite subject of comics since the Olympics), musicals, Charles I, the evolution of language, atheism, the Tour de France and Lord of the Rings. Izzard’s ambition is admirable.
“Spoon”
When it was good, it was absolutely delightful. His mime of the lad who runs the dodgems, his “fear-boredom-diarrhoea”, how the word “spoon” came about – all beautiful, vintage stuff. But we’re only talking moments here. Only once did he produce anything like a brilliant sustained routine (dressage), and so momentum never came. The first half meandered and left me wondering where we was going half the time, his comedy chops a bit rusty. The second was more focused and stronger (thanks to some classic Izzard animal whimsy) but was a little short and was let down by a closing routine on drugs in cycling that petered out.
The most intriguing piece was an autobiographical one from his childhood, in which he spoke about getting busted for stealing make-up, and a girl in France he fancied. Ah it was like a sorbet. For the first time the old smirk was back, and hearing something so personal form Izzard was a little spicy, but frustratingly he didn’t make the most of it, gag-wise. “Animal ghosts” can also go down as a wasted opportunity.
The audience was certainly into it and laughter was plentiful, but it felt like a room striving to enjoy it rather than kicking back and enjoying the ride. It’s notable that arguably the best reception of the night was for Izzard’s reprisal of his classic “Death Star canteen” routine from his 2000 show Circle.
What bothered me about Izzard in Force Majeure was that he wore his intelligence and literacy quite heavily. He has always drawn on history, classics and film, but it’s always been a means to an end, that end being some silly and brilliant routine. But here, his theories and displays of knowledge felt like the end in themself.
Similarly, there were too many slightly unnecessary references to his performing in different languages, as if we didn’t know he did that already. For the first time I can remember, Izzard came across as a bit of a show-off, promoting his credentials as a polymath, which is strange as that’s the sort of thing perhaps a young, insecure stand-up might do rather than a veteran and master of the trade.
People change, and Izzard appears to be evolving into a different type of public speaker, even though his retirement from comedy to focus on politics is still years away. Force Majeure to me shows he is already on that journey: he’s now a man of gravitas and dogma, which are useful traits in the political sphere, but they are holding him back in the comedic one.
3 stars
Review written by Paul Fleckney
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