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Did the solo star vehicle as epic monologue theater peak with Eddie Izzard’s one-woman Hamlet? Isabelle Huppert, Sarah Snook and Andrew Scott have been making moves of their own lately.
This is actually Izzard’s second such dramatic juggling act. The first one was charmingly performed Great Expectations in which she played every role. But where Dickensian drama lends itself to picaresque characterization and sympathetic performance, here Izard, tackling 23 Shakespearean roles on an empty stage, confronts the limits of the form – or perhaps the limits of her own acting skills, which are poorly exposed.
Directed by Selina Cadell and adapted by Izzard’s brother, Marc Izzard, the production is fresh from New York, where it was extended three times. It’s confusing to understand why, even for this self-proclaimed Izzard fan. As a stalwart stand-up, Izzard knows how to hold a crowd. Stage presence is no problem and she looks the part, starkly melancholy in a black jacket and leggings with a gloss of red lipstick. The play is the thing here, except it feels completely overshadowed by the circus gimmick of Izzard’s venture.
She changes places to play characters in conversation, skips across the stage in Hamlet’s antique state, flails when Claudius makes his confession, twirls as he transforms from Polonius to Laertes, holds invisible hand puppets for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and fights with swords clumsily against a bloody outcome.
It’s certainly a marathon feat, but more a feat of memory (barring a few errors) than of performance. Izzard sneaks through the audience occasionally, but walks up and down the stage for the main part, so it essentially feels like a reading, with little compelling movement or emotional purchase.
She also slogs through lines by not breathing enough life into them and gives meaningful glances when the play’s “big” lines are delivered. Is Izard a philosophical Hamlet, an Oedipal Hamlet, or a suicidal Hamlet? The Prince seems too deep to be any of these iterations, Izzard diligently channeling words rather than any meaningful interpretation of the role. The speed means you can’t digest the verse or even follow the change in mood and action. Some of the monologues carry a conspiratorial indignation or a dance performance, and it feels like a shallow imitation of a deep play.
Hamlet’s women are hardly prominent figures, but here they feel particularly shadowy. We don’t get an insight into the Queen and her “too hasty” marriage, nor do we get a sense of Ophelia’s tragedy as it unravels.
Sometimes it looks like avant-garde cabaret, other times like Shakespeare’s “bedroom mirror”, which perhaps should have stayed that way. There is humor, but it comes from Izard’s comic gestures or added lines (“an annoying old fool,” Hamlet says of Polonius) rather than from Shakespeare’s acid satire of Polonius or from Hamlet’s wordplay and antic temper.
None of this is helped by Tom Piper’s almost empty set design, gesturing towards a modernist Helsingør with window slots and little else. There are no props or sets, just slight tweaks to Tyler Elitch’s design – so bilious green when the king’s ghost appears, and white for the monologues, which seems effective at first but gradually becomes crude in its designations.
Most disappointingly, Izard uses the same tone for every character, from Claudius to Gertrude to Hamlet himself—and unlike Scott’s one-man bathtubit doesn’t give characters idiosyncrasies, so those unfamiliar with this text may be left adrift.
Never mind the murder in Hamlet’s heart. This production feels like its own massacre.
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