Although I’m a huge fan of Eddie Izzard’s, this solo adaptation of Dickens’s tale feels like an act of hubris. The actor and stand up describes the show as theatre rather than comedy but it’s not really either – more a piece of lackadaisical storytelling that relies on a huge amount of goodwill from the audience.
The show comes garlanded with rave reviews from its original New York run but at the performance I saw – a Sunday matinee following the Friday premiere – Izzard was stumbling over words and hurtling through the text as if desperate to get to the end. (Izzard uses she/her pronouns and prefers to be known as Suzy but is billed as Eddie in the programme and publicity material here). The familiarity of the story is counterproductive: Great Expectations is so often retold that a poor adaptation really stands out.
