Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an intensely claustrophobic play. Set in a dreary Danish court, mired in a swamp of subtext-laden family drama, and lodged firmly within the lens of its famously neurotic protagonist, it can be a suffocating watch. It is doubly so when its eclectic cast of characters are all constrained to the repertoire of a single actress. But, while suffocation might sound like a bad thing, Eddie Izzard’s single-handed rendition of Hamlet transforms it into a revelatory force.

I admit that when I realized that the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s recent Hamlet production was not simply the famous British actress Eddie Izzard playing Prince Hamlet, but rather Eddie Izzard singlehandedly performing the entirety of Hamlet, I had low hopes. I expected the performance to be confusing at best and unendurably awful at worst. However, Eddie Izzard startled me by revealing, through a frankly marvelous performance, a side of Hamlet that I had not seen before. Her version demonstrates that, while Hamlet might be about poetry, family dysfunction, and Danish politics, it is equally a play about mental illness, depression, insanity, and what it means to be trapped in one’s own head by grief.

In one of the play’s most famous lines, upon being informed of his uncle’s role in his father’s death, Hamlet proclaims that “[t]he time is out of joint,” and that he, by avenging his father, must make it right. The time is out of joint not because it has stopped moving, but because Hamlet—and many of the play’s other characters—are unable to move with it. This timelessness is situated in the characters’ experiences of loss, rather than, as Fortinbras’s approaching army ably demonstrates, any genuine stability in Denmark. Mental illness plagues the play, both real in Ophelia’s case, and feigned, in Hamlet’s, though the line between truth and artifice grows increasingly ambiguous. By the end of the first act, Hamlet’s own sanity lies in question.