Seems like we're getting back on an even keel with the rating viewings now. Quite liking the new pag...
Seems like we're getting back on an even keel with the rating viewings now. Quite liking the new pages in a way. Thanks for all your rates.
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The mark of a good stand up comedian is to be able to engage with an audience, offering them something they can relate to whilst providing funny anecdotal viewpoints on any given subject. An important factor in this is the smoothness with which a stand up will cross from one subject to another with the use of a good link. Where Eddie Izzard differs is in his ability to randomly switch to another subject, make no sense at all, and have the audience (me included) in stitches.
I have not had the luck to see the man live, so I have just had to settle for the DVD instead! Unrepeatable was Eddie's 1994 routine which ran at the Albery Theatre for seven weeks. It was a completely new routine for him, with new material hilariously combined to have the audience in fits of laughter throughout.
The DVD starts off with Eddie's voiceover in an empty theatre, explaining how it's tricky when you're filming in comparison with other nights, because the audience react differently, knowing that they might end up on camera. We get a very brief virtual tour of the theatre, before Eddie is announced and he enters onto the stage and begins to completely and utterly flummux the audience.
Yet it's all material we can relate to. His style is very casual, with him often looking up and away, appearing as if to struggle to find the next topic to talk about. It's not as refined as later performances, but this is, naturally, part of the appeal of him as a stand up comedian, making him seem more human and less robotic. He digresses - A LOT! This, too, is probably deliberate, and I'm sure that a lot of the digression is preconceived, but it doesn't appear that way, and could well be wrong.
The one thing I found about Unrepeatable was that, whereas his later filmed performances relied on repeating material he had used before, it used brand new material and thus the comedy was solely reliant on what he was talking about there and then. No correlation, really, to previous performances.
He covers a wide range of topics, perhaps the funniest being where he talks about cats, and his views on Star Trek. The idea that cats are immensely sophisticated and more intellectual than humans is touched upon, particularly compared to dogs, and this section is hilarious. But the Star Trek topic steals the show, with yet another linkless movement into it. The idea of having more interesting phasers which can be set to different settings other than just the stun and kill settings they had is absolutely hilarious, and some of the ideas he comes up with had me doing nothing short of guffawing!
Yet it's his complete ability to appear that he's bumbling through that makes him so good. This performance isn't as confident and polished as some of his later, more famous shows such as Glorious and Dress To Kill, and he is not quite as relaxed and exuberant as he becomes in these later ones. Here, he is much more raw. But there is still well over an hour of brilliant entertainment here.
Eddie Izzard probably won't be everyone's cup of tea. He has a rather strange method of mumbling through a lot of it, and it's definitely worth putting the subtitles on so you don't miss some of these - they're often gems! I was lucky enough to nab a 6 DVD set of his different stand up routines from Unrepeatable through to Sexie in 2003. This was on offer at the time and I nabbed it for a mere £5. An absolute bargain!
The Unrepeatable DVD has an audio commentary, which is also hilarious, and gives a very good insight into his own views on his performance, as well as a photo gallery. If you want to get this individually, then it's available as an individual DVD for just voer £10. The very same 6 DVD set I have is also currently available for just over £30. Both of them are worth the money in my opinion, even if Eddie is a little raw in this one and not as smooth as in later performances.
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This DVD was recorded one night at the Albert Theatre in March 1994, when Eddie Izzard was ... more
playing a limited seven week sold-out run of his celebrated stand-up show. A completely new show from his previous thirteen week run at the Ambassadors Theatre t...
![Eddie Izzard - Unrepeatable [DVD] [1994]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/78499778.jpg "Eddie Izzard - Unrepeatable [DVD] [1994]")
Jun 6th, 2009
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