Everyone wants rock stars to play their greatest hits. Comedians, not so much – but that’s changing. There was a clamour for dead parrots a few years ago when Monty Python reassembled on stage, and now, in The Remix, Eddie Izzard revisits choice routines from her 35 years in standup. By doing so, she delivers her most purely enjoyable show in a decade, and certainly the one with the lightest touch.
It helps that she keeps her political ambitions (she’scampaigning for selection as the Labour candidate in Brighton Pavilion) to one side – unlike in 2019’s Wunderbar, when they intruded clunkily on the show. They’re mentioned here only to explain that this might be Izzard’s last show for “10 or 15 years”, while she’s busy saving the world from rightwing populism. Here meanwhile are some well-marinated jokes about beekeepers, jazz chickens and monkeys frustratingly not sur la branche.
You might expect a deficit of surprise in a comedy show majoring in jokes lots of us have already heard. But these routines, even in their 90s and 00s prime, were never set in stone. Izzard always riffed on them, burbled around them, stretched them into new shapes – and does so here, developing the flies routine (Live from Wembley, 2009) into a delicious gag about closeup magic (“Is this the poo you were thinking of?”). The belt is loosened considerably on her Death Star canteen sketch, to accommodate added gags about harmonicas, stormtrooper birthday parties and more.
The pleasure is in being reminded of how joyous and imaginatively playful the best of Izzard’s work is, as her Noah’s Ark skit is led – by some very Izzardian synaptic logic – towards jokes about the Owl and the Pussycat and The Generation Game. It’s intensified by the sense of a comic enjoying herself – relieved, perhaps, of the burden of maintaining this quality three decades into her standup career, and with so many others things to do. Crucially, too, The Remix appreciates that whimsy needs strict rationing, and wraps up in little over two hours. If Izzard is lost to standup for 15 years, this will be a fine way to remember her.
At Richmond theatre, London, until 2 December. Then at Brighton Theatre Royal, 4-5 December.
