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.
