Izzard, Eddie

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    ‘Izzard Hamlet New York’ Review: A Solo Show That’s More Noble Than Wise

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    Eddie Izzard is a wildly witty ad-libber, but a play straitjackets this gift — especially in this new staging that is short of ideas.To laugh, or not to laugh? That is the question.Or at least one you may consider early in Eddie Izzard’s “Hamlet,” in which the comic portrays all the roles herself.Something is certainly a little silly about dramatizing Hamlet fighting with his mother by having a left hand wrestle with the arm of the right, evoking Peter Sellers’s scientist who struggles to restrain himself from raising his arm in Nazi salute in “Dr. Strangelove.” And solo sword fights have possibilities that a brilliant comedian like Izzard might exploit.Yet, as Izzard darts around the stage, from role to role, hopscotching in and out of the audience declaiming speeches, what becomes clear is this frenetic staging is earnest, surprisingly traditional and deadly serious. A wildly witty ad-libber, Izzard can make two-hour monologues feel like a stream-of-conscious eruption. A play straitjackets this gift. Except for a few flourishes, this staging, directed by Selina Cadell, is short of ideas. (Imagine sock puppets without the socks and you get an idea of her Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)Inside a modern, minimalist set (designed by Tom Piper) with no props, Izzard, who mounted a solo theatrical adaptation of “Great Expectations” last year, sometimes represents changing characters by spinning, other times by just moving a few feet. If there is method here, I did not detect it. If you don’t know “Hamlet,” there is no chance you are going to follow the play within a play. If you do, you might wonder why Izzard doesn’t spend more time playing the characters watching, not talking.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Solo ‘Great Expectations’ That Calls for Endurance

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      The British comedian Eddie Izzard plays every part in this relatively straightforward adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic story.Eddie Izzard is furrowing her brow in mock confusion, eyes darting this way and that. Pip, the narrator of “Great Expectations,” whom Izzard plays along with every character in this solo spin on the classic, is at a loss for words, and Izzard is committed to the bit.It’s a rare moment, of course, as Izzard, the British comedian and actor, has to get through the whole of Charles Dickens’s densely plotted novel in two hours (with a 15-minute intermission). But these fleeting glimpses of her sly, sideways persona, honed on stand-up stages beginning in the late 1980s, are the highlights of this otherwise straightforward, relatively dry retelling, which was adapted by her brother, Mark Izzard, and opened at the Greenwich House Theater on Thursday.Impassive matter-of-factness and clipped, first-person narration are hallmarks of Izzard’s comedy style, usually applied to keenly observed, and often frankly personal, anecdotes in specials like “Wunderbar,” from this year, and “Dress to Kill,” recorded in 1998. But taking the stage alone to dramatize a decades-spanning coming-of-age tale is a steep hill to climb. (Izzard, who last year completed 32 marathons in 31 days, has a thing for feats of endurance.) In that respect, Izzard’s accomplishment here is impressive, if not without hints at the strain of the effort.Serialized in 1860, “Great Expectations” is packed with incidents involving the orphaned Pip and a cast of richly drawn characters: the stern sister who raised him and her kindly husband; a convict turned mysterious benefactor; a lawyer who delivers the windfall; a devoted tutor; peers; rivals; and, perhaps most memorably, the cold object of his affection, Estella, and the eccentric widow, Miss Havisham, who reared her as an emotional hostage.As Pip, Izzard maintains a measured and mildly animated tone, as if reading to an especially excitable child at bedtime. In a cinched black waistcoat, white ruffled blouse and bold red lipstick (the costume stylists are Tom Piper and Libby Da Costa), Izzard assumes Dickens’s wide array of characters with only subtle modulations of voice and gesture — a hand raised with fingers splayed as Miss Havisham, a slight gaze down the nose for Estella.Instead, the work of distinguishing between speakers falls to the step and half turn she performs, between nearly every line of dialogue, to face the opposing direction, the shuffle of lace-up high-heel boots across the floor like a kind of human metronome. The technique, which Izzard notes in the program is borrowed from Richard Pryor’s stand-up, substitutes physical business where deeper development of individual characters, and the tensions between them and Pip, would be more engaging.Any such interior or relational work is daunting to fathom, though, given the twists and turns in Dickens’s sprawling narrative. Unlike “A Christmas Carol,” a neatly structured, novella-length morality tale frequently adapted for the stage, including in a solo version currently on Broadway starring Jefferson Mays, “Great Expectations” is an unwieldy interpersonal epic. Mark Izzard’s adaptation, which is faithful to Dickens’s prose while slashing it down to the barest threads, moves with such expediency that it can be tough to follow, even with whole characters and subplots excised.Nor does Izzard’s performance, unlike Mays’s in “A Christmas Carol,” aim to make the story’s telling especially theatrical. By the time she reaches the second act’s dizzying tumble of action-packed resolutions, the viewing experience is less about being entertained than rooting for Izzard to cross the finish line with her assurance and charisma intact.The production, directed by Selina Cadell, is simple almost to a fault, with velvet red drapes framing the stage (Piper also designed the set) and lighting, by Tyler Elich, that does the most imaginative work of any element to bring the story into the room. Music compositions by Eliza Thompson, the occasional trill of woodwinds between chapters, has the old-fashioned feel of a radio story hour, but sound design, which might have generated dimension and atmosphere throughout, is curiously absent.Pip reflects, in his youth, on contending with “feelings of restless aspiration.” An artist as prolific and ambitious as Izzard (not to mention an athlete as extreme) can undoubtedly relate. It’s when that eager flash in Izzard’s eyes cuts through the flurry of words that “Great Expectations” lives up to its own.Great ExpectationsThrough Feb. 11 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; eddieizzardgreatexpectations.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Eddie Izzard Plays Which Part in ‘Great Expectations’? All of Them.

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      The British comedian and actor is now performing her solo take on Dickens’s coming-of-age drama Off Broadway. It’s “pure storytelling,” she said.On a December evening in a rehearsal studio on the western edge of Manhattan’s garment district, Eddie Izzard was chatting about audience assumptions — that her solo performance of “Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations” would be a comic take on the classic Victorian coming-of-age tale.“There’s about four jokes in it,” she said.Still, even the way Izzard uttered that sentence was funny: dryly dismissive, with the briefest pause as she calculated the paltry figure. Izzard has, after all, made her name in comedy. And however firmly she might draw a line between Eddie Izzard the stand-up and Eddie Izzard the actor — the British Broadway veteran who was a Tony Award nominee in 2003, for “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” — they are of course one and the same, operating in different yet overlapping modes.In “Great Expectations,” now in previews for a Dec. 15 opening at the Greenwich House Theater in Greenwich Village, Izzard pulls moments of levity from the very air. Playing the orphaned Pip, the forsaken Miss Havisham, the alluring Estella, the desperate Magwitch and 15 or so others, she brings her own arch humor to a multiple-character technique that she ascribes not to some drama theorist but to the comedian Richard Pryor, a virtuoso of the crowded solo stage.When, in rehearsal that evening, Izzard worried aloud about her Pip blocking the audience’s view of Miss Havisham — who at that moment in the scene was quite invisible, as was Estella beside her — it was all about leaving room for the spectators’ imaginations to fill in the blanks.Over the phone later, the show’s director, Selina Cadell, laughed warmly as she said: “I think Eddie looks after the invisible characters better than I do.”“Great Expectations” begins on Christmas Eve, and Dickens did love a Christmas story. But its saga stretches over years, and Izzard says the holiday timing of the play’s run in New York — scheduled to continue through Feb. 11 — is accidental.Unlike Jefferson Mays’s solo performance of “A Christmas Carol,” currently on Broadway, Izzard’s “Great Expectations” has almost nothing in the way of scenery, aside from the velvet curtains of its wooden-floored set, and certainly no whiz-bang, high-tech projections.“This is pure storytelling,” Izzard said after rehearsal. “I’ve always said that drama is like a main meal, and comedy is like a dessert. We love desserts. But the main meal has all different tastes, the savory and the sweets and everything.”Izzard in “Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations,” at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan through Feb. 11.Carol RoseggAt 60, she is ready to dig in — and to demonstrate what she’s capable of.“Drama is something I’ve always wanted to do from the beginning, and just went a long way round to get to it,” said Izzard, who lately has been preparing a one-woman “Hamlet” with Cadell. In such multicharacter solo shows, Izzard finds her own gender fluidity helpful.“I love the fact that I’m playing male characters and female characters in this,” she said. “And I hope that Dickens might think it was OK.”Izzard is fond of noting that the novelist, in his lifetime, used to travel to New York to give public readings. This “Great Expectations” began with readings, too, as Izzard did what she calls work-in-progress performances, initially in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The streamlined adaptation is by her older brother, Mark Izzard, though when Eddie suggested the project to him, she meant for them to work on the script together.“I went back and read the book and got started,” Mark said by phone, all practicality, “and found out later that Eddie was too busy to do anything. So I just pushed on.”Back in the rehearsal room, Eddie pulled out her phone and scrolled, seeking a photo from the summer of 2020: a time-capsule image of an early pandemic performance. It shows her in a red dress, doing “Great Expectations” for a socially distanced audience on a wind-whipped rooftop in the south of England, using a hand-held microphone.“I said, ‘This is exactly how Dickens planned it,’” she deadpanned.THEATER REHEARSAL ROOMS are workaday spaces, and people tend to dress accordingly. Almost no one looks glamorous, let alone devastatingly so. But that evening in early December, Izzard did, in a tailored black jacket over onyx tights, with a splash of color in the few fluttery inches of floral-print skirt — a very British touch — peeking out beneath the jacket hem. On her feet were a stunning pair of tall, lace-up, high-heeled black boots: a part of her costume that she wanted to get used to wearing.“If you are trans, it’s probably better to be fairly well put together,” she said, and sighed at the difference between taking meticulous care with her appearance and throwing on any old thing, as she said a person can do “if you look devastatingly feminine. Female. I mean, Marilyn Monroe wore a potato sack at one point in a photo shoot.”Let the record show, though, that Izzard was not just fairly well, but magnificently, tastefully put together. If you’ve seen the 2009 documentary “Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story,” which includes a short section ridiculing her historical lack of fashion sense when it came to standard-issue guy clothes, you will recognize this as a sartorial leap forward.About her pronouns, when I asked, she said: “Prefer she/her, don’t mind he/him, so no one can get it wrong.”It was such a breezy, practiced statement that I thought she was done until she added: “And I didn’t change them. The world changed them.”What’s this?“I was on a program. They said, ‘Do you want she/her or he/him?’ I went, ‘Ahh, oh, she.’ I’d been thinking of changing them. And then the program went out, and the whole world changed them. Two days.” She made a sound effect like a series of detonations.“All news outlets, particularly in America and Britain, where I’m known probably the strongest” — another sound effect, this one a whoosh — “and Australia and Canada and New Zealand, where I’m also known” — a sound effect like a rapid whir — “‘She/her now.’ And I went, ‘Oh, OK.’”It wasn’t that she merely went along with it, but she was surprised at the sweeping abruptness with which her pronouns were adopted.“I thought it was a great honor,” she said. “I’ve been promoted — promoted to she. That’s how it was. But I didn’t actively have a campaign about it. It just happened. You know, I came out 37 years ago. Some people grumble. I say, well, how much notice do you need? Thirty-eight years? Thirty-nine years?”Izzard’s audiobook of “Great Expectations” was released in 2018, and she always thought there would be a companion stage version.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesComing out is an inherently political act, and Izzard is a political creature. In American terms, she described herself as a Democrat, but at home she is a longtime member of the Labour Party and this fall had hoped to become its candidate for an open seat in Parliament. That bid failed this month, though not before drawing what The Guardian newspaper called “a barrage of abuse,” with both Conservative and Labour politicians publicly making transphobic remarks.But Izzard said that increased mainstream awareness of transgender people and transgender issues has made life easier since she came out in 1985, when she described herself as transvestite — language that, she noted, has since evolved.“We were considered non-people, or toxic people,” she said. “And I realized that my job is to try and knit being trans into society. We had a hard time just trying to exist.”She went on: “A lot of people have been wonderfully accepting, and young people are very open and great. Some people are still transphobic, but” — she took a deep breath, then finished the sentence more quietly — “I just ignore them.”CADELL FIRST met Izzard about two decades ago, when the agent Nicki van Gelder asked Cadell, who is also an actor, to coach Izzard for a film role.Izzard loves acting for the big screen — loves that movies can capture forever what she called “that lightning in a bottle” that is a beautiful performance, loves having played Edward VII to Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria in “Victoria & Abdul,” loves having been in both “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” even in small roles.But when I asked Cadell what makes Izzard tick as an actor, she mentioned the live-performance dynamic between Izzard and a crowd.“I think she is someone who loves that present moment with an audience. It electrifies her imagination,” Cadell said. “Laughter is very important to Eddie. I also think that Eddie is driven to try everything she feels is, in some way, challenging. But I think she keenly understands the relationship of a performer with an audience, which I adore.”Izzard was only 6 when her mother died in 1968. After that, her widowed father sent her and her brother to boarding school. In “Believe,” the documentary, there is a sweet moment when a former headmaster recalls a teddy bear show that young Eddie put on at the foot of her bed, using a bathrobe as the stage curtain.A couple of years later, when the school did a production of “Oliver!,” the “Oliver Twist” musical that Izzard remembers as her first Dickens, she begged to be cast but was assigned to play the clarinet in the orchestra. (Recalling this, she burst into snatches of songs she’d yearned to sing: “Oliver! Oliver!” and “Got to pick a pocket or two, boys, you’ve got to pick a pocket or two.”)The same thing happened with “The Pirates of Penzance,” for which she would have been happy to play either a pirate or a girl. She was 17 when she got her first dramatic role — as Ernst Ludwig, the Nazi, in “Cabaret” — and dyed her hair jet black to play it.So acting, in her growing-up years, was mostly just dreamed of, and a passion for Dickens didn’t take root in a child who was dyslexic and not a big reader, but also enthralled with astronauts and all things 20th-century American.“Great Expectations” came into Izzard’s life when she asked her agents to find someone to hire her to make an audiobook of a Dickens novel — because she had noticed that audiobooks were taking off, she wanted to read a great work of literature, and she and Dickens share a birthday, 150 years apart.Izzard’s audiobook of “Great Expectations,” which is more than 20 hours long, was released in 2018. In Izzard’s mind, there was always going to be a stage version as a companion piece — though she had envisioned the audiobook as the primary element. She says it didn’t occur to her initially that once she got the live performance down, it could remain permanently in her repertoire. Its running time, rather more accessible than the book’s: about two hours, intermission included.LISTEN CLOSELY to people’s memories, and sometimes you hear their ambitions underneath. Here is Izzard remembering the night she lost the Tony to Brian Dennehy, and found herself in the company of some other acting nominees.“I was standing next to Stanley Tucci and Philip Seymour Hoffman,” she said. “I thought, I’m in this group? This is the group that didn’t get the Tony?” She whispered the next bit, savoringly: “This is a good group to be in.”Nearly 20 years later, she knows that some people continue to write her off as solely a comedian, not also an actor. She knows that acting gets a different kind of respect than comedy.“I think my dramatic work now has got really to an interesting place, a place where I don’t quite know where it’s going to go,” Izzard said.She intends to “keep pushing” with it as she finds out.For now, that means donning those glorious boots downtown at Greenwich House, channeling Pip and company. Digging into the main meal that is her acting, she’ll be sharing it only with the audience. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Six Minutes to Midnight’ Review: A Finishing School for the Nazi Elite

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      In this suspense thriller set in the 1930s, Judi Dench and Eddie Izzard are stalwart Brits at a sinister girl’s school in England.There have been an awful lot of movies made not just about World War II but about the days leading up to it. So new angles can be hard to find. How about this: a Nazi girl’s school in a seaside town in England in the 1930s?Such a place did exist: the Augusta Victoria College at Bexhill-on-Sea. Its school badge contained both a Union Jack and a swastika. It was here that daughters of the Nazi elite went for finishing. Out of this peculiar fact, Eddie Izzard, whose family hails from Bexhill, determined to forge a film; Izzard not only stars in “Six Minutes to Midnight” but is also one of the writers of the screenplay as well as an executive producer.The scenario grafts a fictional Hitchcock-redolent suspense thriller to the reality of the school’s existence. “Midnight” opens with the disappearance of an instructor at the school, under sinister circumstances. Enter Izzard as Thomas Miller, come to replace him. Like his predecessor, Miller is a British spy really sent to gather intelligence on the school. While the activities of the students, their German instructor Ilse (Carla Juri) and their British headmistress (Judi Dench) seem on the up-and-up, pedagogy-wise, the environment nevertheless looks ripe for espionage. And when Miller witnesses the student body’s enthusiastic response to a speech by Adolf Hitler on the wireless, he figures the suspicions of his superiors are correct.Classified lists, a secret evacuation plan and a murder frame-up all come into play. The double-crosses are depicted by the director Andy Goddard with better-than-average craft, but the more the movie leans into old suspense conventions the more interest it loses, alas.Six Minutes to MidnightRated PG-13 for violence. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      in Television

      For Eddie Izzard, a ‘99’ Ice Cream and a Waterloo Sunset Are Wondrous Things

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      The star of “Six Minutes to Midnight,” opening Friday, tells why Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, “Great Expectations,” David Bowie and London landmarks hold meaning for her.Eddie Izzard, the British comedian-actor-writer-activist-endurance runner, tends to push herself to the limit. And then some.“I do find — because I had my sort of 10 wilderness years before things took off — that I’ve tried very hard to stay four steps ahead of where I need to be,” Izzard, who is transgender, said in a video interview from London.She performs stand-up in English, French, German and Spanish. She channels 21 characters in a one-person show of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” She runs multiple marathons for charity — clocking 32 in 31 days in January, each followed by a comedy routine, for her Make Humanity Great Again campaign, which supports global unity and tolerance.And still, Izzard found time to co-write, executive produce and star in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” set in 1939, about a teacher at a finishing school in the south of England whose students include the daughters of high-ranking Nazis. The film, out Friday, based on a true story she learned about from a museum curator in Bexhill-on-Sea, where her family is from, was a 10-year process: five to develop the characters and five to get her acting to a level where she could play a lead, alongside stars like Judi Dench.Catch her while you can: Izzard hopes to go into politics in the near future as a member of Parliament for the Labour party, during which she’ll take a hiatus from performing.With her career in high gear, the timing may not be perfect, but she’s not worried. “There’s the critical momentum you need when you’re going in,” she said, “but that will stick around for when you come out.”Izzard channeled her trademark whimsy into her list of 10 cultural essentials — from the fantasy world of the Narnia books to the simple delights of an ice cream cone — which she wrote herself. KATHRYN SHATTUCK1. Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations My mum used to love to listen to classical music. My mum and dad were married in ‘Adan (Aden) in Yemen and Dad talked of her liking to go up onto the roof of a local hotel and play classical music from a gramophone record as the sun set. I think that, amongst others records, she would have played Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, as it was one of the classical albums that was often played in the house. My mum died when I was only 6 years old, but I do remember hearing different albums played at home in the years she was alive, and this one stuck with me from an early age. The fact that he was called Edward, and so was I, didn’t hurt.2. “30 Rock” “30 Rock” is just gold dust. If you have a brain and a sense of humor, just buy the first episode. If it grabs you then just do what I did and download the whole box set. The height of great comedy is to be as intelligent as it is bonkers, and this is it. It’s the kind of sitcom that probably only could exist in a post-“Seinfeld” America, and it probably had to fight just as hard as “Seinfeld” did for its own existence over its first few seasons.3. “David Bowie: Finding Fame” The key thing in this documentary to take home to your brain is that it shows the 10 wilderness years before Bowie took off with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. One needs to know that he was in his first band in 1962, when the Beatles were just taking off. So the stamina that 10 years adrift taught him, and also the few times when it looked like things were taking off but then didn’t, must have informed the rest of his career. I didn’t realize until I watched this that he was at times, in the early days, way off course but he kept regrouping and coming back.4. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C.S. Lewis It is a great mystical adventure story to feed the imagination of kids. You have to understand that I’m dyslexic and so read very few books, but I read all of the seven Narnia ones when I was young. I later found out that Lewis was lacing in religion to the series, and this made every feel a little hoodwinked about the whole thing. But later, I realized you could just ignore the symbolism if you wanted to.5. “The Great Escape” A classic war film and one I’ve watched many times. The fact it is based in truth, when a lot of war films in those days were not, makes it even better. I like the film so much, I’ve even watched it in German. As I do my stand-up in German, I was playing Berlin, and I bought the DVD of the film there. If you switch on the German audio track and just have English subtitles, it is a different film. Suddenly they’re all talking German, and so it just becomes a battle between an extreme right regime and people fighting for a return to humanity.6. “Waterloo Sunset” Written by Ray Davies of the Kinks and performed by them. It’s a song that I’ve always thought was accidentally perfect for me as I knew exactly where to see a Waterloo sunset. Waterloo Bridge is my favorite London bridge (we have many). When I was a street performer at Covent Garden, I used to walk across the bridge to perform in front of the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. And at some point soon after Covid, I will perform inside the Festival Hall. And then I’ll watch another sunset and I will play “Waterloo Sunset” again.7. “Pogles’ Wood” If you search for “Pogles’ Wood: Honey Bees” on YouTube, you can see an episode of this early animated TV series that I was mesmerized by when I was about 5 years old. Normally if you watch back at TV shows that you found entertaining at that age, you will find them tired and old-fashioned in modern times. But “Pogles’ Wood” still holds up with its mixture of animated characters, weirdly beguiling music and short pieces of live-action documentary that showed and taught you things from the real world.8. The “99” Ice Cream What did people do before ice cream? Nobody knows. But the “99” is a staple of the British ice cream world. It is just a basic wafer cone with soft white vanilla ice cream swirled on top of it, but the crowning difference that makes it a thing of genius is a chocolate Flake stuck diagonally (always diagonally) into the side of the vanilla ice cream.Once you buy your “99,” experienced users will have their own eating ritual to perform. Mine is always to push the chocolate Flake with one finger so that you push it down into the center of the cone. Then you close the hole in the ice cream over with your tongue and carry on eating the cone as if it never had a chocolate Flake. Then, when you are down to the final handle part of the cone, you have a heady mixture of wafer, vanilla ice cream and flaky chocolate to feast upon.9. “Great Expectations” Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, and slightly bizarrely, I was born on Feb. 7, 1962, 150 years later. Having never read a great work of literature, I thought I should start with a work of Dickens due to the weird link. I chose “Great Expectations” to firstly read and record it to become an audiobook (which I have now done), and then I thought I should turn it into a solo show. So I commissioned my older brother, Mark, to adapt it down from over 20 hours of book into a 90-minute solo performance.Apart from it being one of Dickens’ more mature books and a great story of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella, “Great X” is also interesting for me as it starts off down to the South East of London, along the river Thames towards the mouth of the river. This is the Chatham, Kent area of England and was where Dickens grew up, and the book starts here in about the 1820s, which is when he was there as a child. So you hear about “the marshes” direct from his childhood, a place that was barren in the winter and glorious in the summer.10. The Parks of London I do find them a joy. Are they culture? I think so, for they can inspire. Two of our biggest are slap bang in the center of London. They are Hyde Park and Kensington Park. They are essentially one large park, but they have West Carriage Drive running between that separates them. The ancient Serpentine River runs through them, which was long ago turned into a boating lake. Speakers’ Corner, where anyone can pull up and hold forth on any subject, is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park — which is right by the beginning of the old Roman road of Watling Street. I encourage anyone to take a walk from the bottom corner of one park to the top corner of the other park on a warm and sunny day, and it will feel like a walk in the countryside. More