Along with being one of the most beloved, awarded, and enthusiastically quoted stand-up comedians in the game for the past thirty-plus years, Eddie Izzard Izzard goes by “Suzy” offstage but continues to use “Eddie” professionally. is a marathoner. In 2016, she ran 27 marathons in 27 days, crossing South Africa in tribute to Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison. In 2020, she ran 29 marathons in 29 days to raise money for charity. (It was supposed to be 28, but the day after she finished she thought, Oh, what the hell and ran another one.) In January 2021, she did the 26.2 miles on her treadmill every day of the month, and performed a stand-up gig every night. I don’t know how any of this is physically possible, but I’ve heard from people who, like Eddie and unlike me, apparently enjoy cardio (I have my doubts) that the key is to “pace yourself.”
As advice to a runner, that seems solid enough. But Izzard’s current theatrical project—23 roles in a solo Hamlet, adapted by her brother Mark Izzard and directed without interpretive flourish by Selina Cadell—offers a proof for why the melancholy Dane didn’t include similar guidance in his advice to the players. In the marbled white box of Tom Piper’s set, Izzard approaches Shakespeare’s play like a diligent athlete: She focuses, metes out her energy, and avoids burnout. She also avoids tragedy and revelation. It’s clear that she’s working hard to complete a challenging task, but what’s at stake for her, and for all of us, beyond the simple goal of completion is unclear. What is the play about for her, and for Cadell? Why tell us this story? At this point in its history, Hamlet has an unhelpful Everest of precedent, expectation, opinion, and awe built up around it. That eminence seems to have attracted Izzard’s ambition, but the distance runner in her has eclipsed the actor. Taking on Hamlet doesn’t just mean getting it done. It’s not a matter of reaching the top (or planting a flag); it’s a matter of burrowing inwards — clearing a tunnel through the hardened strata of reputation to mine for the story’s heart.
Despite her years of charismatic ease on stage—and despite the relative brevity of her brother’s adaptation, which has trimmed Shakespeare’s longest text to just under two and a half hours including intermission—Izzard starts out stiffly. Perhaps the fact that Hamlet begins with several characters on edge in the dark isn’t serving her, but narrative content aside, there’s still a whiff of actorly tension in the air, almost as if Izzard feels she needs to prove that she can keep a straight and solemn face. At the same time, as she takes on Hamlet’s pal Horatio and the guard Bernardo, her physicality undermines that solemnity. To embody multiple characters, Izzard does what she’s always done in stand-up, and what it’s anyone’s first impulse to do when telling a manic, funny story in multiple personas: She hops back and forth to face herself—or rather, to face the empty space where she just was—as she switches parts. The show credits a movement director (Didi Hopkins), but even so, there’s something a shade too automatic, too clumsily literal in Izzard’s gestural vocabulary. If the entire enterprise were pitched in a different tone—more frenetic, more openly comic, wily, or satirical—this might not matter. But more often than not, Izzard seems earnestly committed to doing Hamlet straight down the middle.
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