Review: Suzy Eddie Izzard's 'The Tragedy of Hamlet'

Izzard confronts Shakespeare's most tortured soul. This production comes directly from her critically acclaimed solo performances of Shakespeare’s HAMLET, which were triple-extended in New York.

On Thursday night in Melbourne, I had the absolute pleasure of seeing Eddie Izzard perform her one-woman show of Hamlet at the Arts Centre, and with my good friend Kevin;

Direct from triple-extended solo runs in New York, Chicago and London, Eddie Izzard brings her acclaimed one-person performance of Hamlet to Sydney. Nominated for New York’s Drama League Distinguished Performance Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, this production has captivated audiences around the world.

Akin to original performances of Hamlet, Izzard will perform on the blank canvas of a bare stage, letting Shakespeare’s words and pure storytelling take the spotlight. Masterfully inhabiting the world of Hamlet, Izzard seamlessly shifts between the play’s twenty-three characters with clarity and emotional depth.

Izzard is a multi-talented artist whose career spans film, theatre and activism. Now she brings her charisma and creativity to one of the world’s most enduring tragedies. Bold, intimate and unforgettable—this is Hamlet as you’ve never seen it before.

Adapted by Mark Izzard and directed by Selina Cadell.

Also;

Eddie Izzard (born February 7, 1962, Aden, Yemen) is a British comedian and actor best known for her surreal, stream of consciousness stand-up comedy. She is also well known for her work in film and television, as well as her political activism. Izzard is gender-fluid and prefers to be called Suzy, though she continues to use the name Eddie professionally.

Suzy is a trans woman; and for this show she’s touring with her more prominent and recognisable stage-name of Izzard, so that’s how I shall refer to her throughout.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

Let me begin by saying; this is a dramaturgical feat! Izzard plays 23 character of William Shakespeare’s longest play. In its written form it contains approximately 4,000 lines and roughly 30,000 words. For this adapted one-woman show, Izzard apparently delivers 1,500 lines and does so on a sparse stage.

In the Fairfax Studio there was a black curtain, one shaft of severe light utilised minimally for ghosts apparitions only, and …. Izzard; wearing leather boot-pants, a peplum blazer like armour, hair in high-pony and a gash of red lipstick. That’s it! Not even a prop skull to stand-in for poor Yorick in the gravedigger’s scene. Not even a glass or bottle of water (which none in the audience would have begrudged her, let me tell you!)

Interestingly; the house-lights at Fairfax were also on low … so the audience could see one another, and Izzard could - and did - look directly at us throughout, sometimes pulling us into the story (as audience for the play-within-a-play, for instance).

The low-lights were particularly genius, as Izzard walked out before the play officially began to;

1.) Clarify that anyone attending in the hopes of hearing their old stand-up routines (and my Dad is an avowed fan of the “Death Star canteen,” let me tell you) would quickly be disavowed of that notion (though there would still be moments of levity), and;

2.) To state that it’s only in recent memory that plays have shifted from participatory, civic rituals to more passive, observational viewing (the difference between performing “to” and “at” an audience is how Izzard likens it) … and that this one-woman performance of Hamlet would be a return to shattering of the fourth wall, channeling the direct, somewhat interactive style of Elizabethan theatre.

Given the Hamlet of it all, one might instantly conjure the scene Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet adaptation in which the crowd is so moved that they reach out to touch the tragic character.

Thus duly contextualised Izzard began; roaming the stage as guards encountered the ghostly King; “Who’s there?”

I must admit, in the beginning when Izzard paced and physically shifted their body back and forth on the spot to play both Barnardo and Francisco it felt a little … silly. You could feel the audience shift in their seats, fidget and cough - a restlessness in case this was going to be hard to sustain.

And then the ghost appeared - Izzard looks up to the rafters, almost like they’re following a kite on a string, Horatio enters and … magic.

There was such a subtle shift in the audience - as though mention of this ghostly apparition likewise gave us permission to believe in the impossible and suspend our disbelief. From that moment on it truly felt like we were all with Izzard.

She does wonderfully subtle bits of ingenuity for character development and distinguishing - like giving Polonius a limp, or having Ophelia be a little more upright and balletic in her stance.

There is a lot of pacing involved, to define scenes and bring energy to the sparse stage, but a rhythm starts - particularly with Laertes and Hamlet especially; who can feel wonderfully frenetic with all his walking and stomping, only for him to suddenly stop and deliver soliloquy so you know the depth of his torment, and that for all his swagger he is tumultuous elsewhere.

My favourite bit of ingenuity was Izzard using her own hands as puppet talking-heads for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; which so beautifully encapsulates those characters and their purpose in the play too.

Definitely scenes that required more physicality and outlier characters - like the gravedigger’s - were brilliantly wrought by Izzard, and it was amazing how much the solo started to fall away as she managed to make the words sing and rise up … scenes of comedy had such propulsion to them especially.

Izzard is 64-years-old. To watch her perform shadow-fencing between Hamlet and Laertes at the end, and having (by my estimation) coughed twice and possibly had only one moment of lapse before getting back on track … I was completely spellbound by this performance. It was remarkable, and I don’t think I’ll ever have the honour of seeing its like again.

I will admit, if you’re a first-timer to Shakespeare and Hamlet then this is probably a little too heavy a first encounter. But for those of us who love the language and ideas, and finding new ways to engage and be lifted into the prose and plot - phenomenal.

5/5

The performance is still running from now until July 12 in Melbourne, and I implore you to get along if you can!

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

At the end, Izzard broke the fourth-wall again and returned to the stage to comment on how so many people are rather perturbed that a trans woman is performing Hamlet solo, and hoping to do so all around the world.

But how apt, that a play about a country falling to violence and disarray because of the murder, death, and violence within one family should still resonate some 400-years after it was first written … and thus be interpreted by someone gender-fluid, so brilliantly able to inhabit all the characters at once, containing multitudes.

I completely agree, and I’m thrilled that some Australian reviewers have similarly raved about her powerhouse performance;

• Eddie Izzard’s Hamlet review: what a piece of work! Suzy Eddie Izzard says it’s a particularly audacious time for a trans woman to be touring a one-person production of Hamlet around the world, but that’s the least of your reasons to see it.

This above all: to thine own self be true

I love Shakespeare anyway, but obviously a few days out from the release of my latest book, Shakespeare in the Orchard - which spins around interned German prisoners in Australia in WWI performing Hamlet, to ingratiate themselves to hostile townsfolk on Empire Day … seeing this performance right now, held special relevance.

I keep coming back to the “why, Shakespeare?” of it all and for me it truly is the magic of humanity, that some leather-maker’s son could have written something hundreds of years ago that I found could reflect the times of the Great War (civilian prisoners putting on a play in the hopes of catching the conscience of a jingoistic audience) in the same way a trans woman like Suzy Eddie Izzard could think now is the time for her to show the dynamism of the Bard … brilliant.