“It’s logical that I should be able to do Act One,” says Izzard, turning self-critical, “because it’s all vaudeville.” (Literally-Nichols intended the part to be played by a stand-up comic and was, in his words, “cock-a-hoop”-delighted-when Izzard signed on.) “What we’re working on now is trying to keep the black in the black humor of Act Two.” Izzard and Hamilton as Bri and Sheila appeared to be having, well, too much fun. The only substantial criticism was that the second act, when the marriage is being ripped apart by the strain of taking care of the child, lacked credibility. The play, and both Hamilton and Izzard, received glowing reviews in London. “They’ll get a letter and cry, ‘Oh, God, I’m 1-A! I’ve got to go to the … theater!’ ” “Is that like conscription?” asks Izzard. But then, there they were at the stage door afterwards in a flood of tears saying, ‘Oh, my God, theater! We never knew! We’d only ever seen movies!’ ”Īnd now Hamilton and Izzard will be performing to the Roundabout Theatre’s largely subscription audience, a concept they can’t quite get their heads around. “I know that a good 30 percent of them had never seen a play before. “The curtain would come up to 200 people chanting Ed-die! Ed-die!” says Hamilton, laughing. When he took over the role of Bri (as in Brian) after matinee-idol Clive Owen ( Croupier) left to make a movie, the audience for Joe Egg changed dramatically. Over several post-rehearsal glasses of wine with Hamilton one recent night at a midtown hotel bar, Izzard wondered what the Broadway audience would be like. To that end, he’s been starring opposite Victoria Hamilton, one of London’s most celebrated stage actresses, in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Peter Nichols’s bitterly funny 1967 drama about a couple with a severely handicapped daughter (the title’s namesake). ‘I claim India for Britain!’ They go, ‘You can’t claim us-we live here! Five hundred million of us!’ ‘Do you have a flag? No flag, no country.’ ”īut these days, what Izzard wants most, he says, is to be a serious actor. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. “We stole countries with the cunning use of flags,” he riffs. The diverse references in his shows are deconstructed on fan sites as if each of his monologues were The Waste Land, and his bits are parroted as religiously in England as lines from The Simpsons are here: Izzard is the hottest comic in Britain- Monty Python’s John Cleese has called him “the funniest man in England,” and huge crowds (over 11,000 at Wembley Arena during his Dress to Kill tour) have seconded the opinion. Freakishly intelligent hamsters, squirrels, and cats, charmingly malicious inanimate objects, and edifying historical tangents are the stuff of Eddie Izzard’s comedy.
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