Eddie Izzard: Stripped - Tout en francais !
June 2011 at Theatre-de-Dix-Heures
My French sucks. Sure, I get by on a day-to-day basis and have, on occasion, engaged in polemiques over religion, history, linguistics and government, but have been quietly informed on more than one occasion that at a certain point in my argument I am no longer constructing actual sentences but merely allowing a string of tenuously related French words to fall out of my mouth and have generally stopped making sense. This is true whether my polemic is lubricated by wine or water.
My comprehension of French is not much better, so it was with some trepidation that I bought my ticket for Eddie Izzard’s opening night in Paris for his show Stripped – Tout en francais! Mr. Izzard’s French is certainly better than mine, but it’s not perfect and his questions to the audience to correct verb tense, noun gender, sentence structure and the occasional oh fuck-it moments are endearingly familiar to anyone who has gone through the rite of passage of butchering, questioning but nevertheless plowing ahead with less-than-perfect French.
Slipping in a few bon mots en franglais here and there (abso-fucking-lutement!), he delighted both francophones and anglophones with his fantastical universe of driving velociraptors, cavemen named Steve (a wonderfully ludicrous name in French, by the way), miscommunication among the ancient Romans and mammoths in the Marais. While the words that fell out of Mr. Izzard’s mouth were of his own out-of-the-box logic, they made perfect sense as he shared his always intelligent, insightful and highly entertaining observations on atheism, world history, the birth of language and… well, he doesn’t talk about the government, although he does point out the more diabolical points of iTunes with the same appreciation for nonsense that French bureaucracy often inspires.
We were lucky enough to have a little chat with Mr. Izzard after the show and he was, understandably, pumped up after a successful opening night. He was thrilled that the audience was about 70% francophone, and shares his plans to conquer the world as only a language geek might, by continuing the show in German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and, possibly, Dutch. I made that last one up, but Mr. Izzard’s energy and enthusiasm for language, history and the absurd make him a perfect fit for Paris. Vive la comédie anglaise, tout en francais!
June 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine