Wunderbar

Instead of the standard massive arena stage, Eddie Izzard paces a tiny basement, trading grand spectacle for intimate, stream-of-consciousness rambling. The show winds through a loose history of humanity from the Big Bang to last Tuesday. It is built on classic Izzard logic, featuring bits about tigers pausing to say grace before hunting, a physical routine about a dinosaur game show, and speculation on what dogs are actually trying to communicate when they bark.\n\nFilmed at the Top Secret Comedy Club in London, the 2022 special represents a literal and figurative return to her roots. After her father passed away during the tour, Izzard elected to record the special in a 200-capacity basement just yards from where she worked as a street performer in Covent Garden in the 1980s. The material itself had a multi-lingual genesis, having been first improvised in French on a floating theater in Paris, then in German in Berlin, before being shaped into English.\n\nThe tour was billed as a farewell to stand-up before her planned entry into British politics. While some critics felt her appeals for global unity bordered on the messianic, the performance succeeds on the strength of her wordless pantomime and bizarre historical analogies.