Eddie Izzard: ‘If you are trans, it’s probably better to be fairly well put together.’ Photographs: Josefina Santos/New York TimesOn an early-December evening in a rehearsal studio on the western edge of Manhattan’s garment district,
When, in rehearsal that evening, Izzard worries aloud about her Pip blocking the audience’s view of Miss Havisham – who at that moment in the scene is quite invisible, as is Estella beside her – it is all about leaving room for the spectators’ imaginations to fill in the blanks. Izzard is fond of noting that the novelist would travel to New York to give public readings. This staging of Great Expectations began with readings, too, as Izzard did what she calls work-in-progress performances, initially in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The streamlined adaptation is by her older brother, Mark Izzard, though when Eddie suggested the project to him, she meant for them to work on the script together.
Let the record show, though, that Izzard is not just fairly but magnificently tastefully put together. If you’ve seen the 2009 documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, which includes a short section ridiculing her historical lack of fashion sense when it came to standard-issue guy clothes, you will recognise this as a sartorial leap forward.
“All news outlets, particularly in America and Britain, where I’m known probably the strongest” – another sound effect, this one a whoosh – “and Australia and Canada and New Zealand, where I’m also known” – a sound effect like a rapid whirr – “‘She/her now.’ And I went, ‘Oh, okay.’” Coming out is an inherently political act, and Izzard is a political creature. At home she is a long-time member of the British Labour Party and this autumn had hoped to become its candidate for an open seat in parliament. That bid failed this month, though not before drawing what the Guardian newspaper called “a barrage of abuse”, with both Conservative and Labour politicians publicly making transphobic remarks.
A couple of years later, when the school did a production of Oliver!, the Oliver Twist musical that Izzard remembers as her first Dickens, she begged to be cast but was assigned to play the clarinet in the orchestra.
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