Eddie Izzard: Broadway’s Hamlet

In a long career of scribbling there are some scribbles which belong in the “only in your dreams” category. Wake up Malone, you’re hallucinating again! Here’s my latest. 

(In confidence, there have over the years been quite a few such moments. We all remember the one about Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister. I’ve deleted the one recounting that Nicola Sturgeon agreed to hand over all her WhatsApp messages). 

Here goes: Eddie Izzard triumphed at New York’s downtown Greenwich Theater in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Particularly striking, and in no particular order, were his/her Hamlet, Gertrude, Ophelia (very good at Gertrude and Ophelia) – no surprise there, then (ed) – Claudius, Polonius, Horatio, Laertes, Fortinbras, Ghost of Hamlet’s father. Yes, and even Yorick.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not included as they were portrayed only by Izzard’s right and left hands, so that deux mains performance will be credited separately. 

For the very slow on the uptake, Suzy Eddie Izzard (Spring 2023 name change by self-declaration) was performing a one-person Hamlet, following up on her huge success with Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in 2022. 

For regular readers who know my politically-correct-pronoun-tolerance fuse is permanently dialled back to the shortest possible setting, you may be surprised to find that from now on I am going to stick to Izzard’s preference and refer to the artist as “her”. 

Why? Early on in the current gender double entendre debacle Eddie Izzard made clear that dressing as a woman was up to him. Too damned right! I dress as I like and wear my Marks and Spencer’s underwear with pride. If the former “he” chooses to be”‘she” it’s none of my damned business. Simple courtesy to accede. “To ‘she’, instead of ‘he’, that is the question?” 

I had learnt about the Hamlet show when I arranged to meet up for a coffee on Lincoln Square with London’s OperaGlass Works’ terrible twins, Selina Cadell and Eliza Thompson. Turned out they were in New York because Cadell was directing and Thompson had composed the music for the Izzard performance. “When’s the show?” “Starts on Thursday with the preview. It will be quite rough!” Irresistible. 

I collared one of the few remaining tickets and headed downtown to the Greenwich House Theater, in Barrow Street at the heart of trendy Greenwich Village. On TripAdvisor, Greenwich House Theater would be described as “basic”. 

The 199-seat venue – more stringent New York fire department regulations kick in at 200 – has been in business since 1917. It is off-Broadway basic. The front-of-house facilities consist of an entrance door and a gloomy hall with an excuse for a bar in the right hand corner and a ticket desk on the left.  A glassy-eyed usherette explains robotically to allcomers that “the house will open in five minutes”.

She persists in this myth for twenty minutes. By now the entrance hall is heaving – it is raining stair rods outside. The huddled masses of fellow Hamlet goers span a wide spectrum of Manhattan’s illuminati. A multitude of walking aid appliances clash noisily. Doors open ten minutes after start time. We pile into the auditorium, and I immediately make friends with Malcolm in the seat in front. 

He has come across from New Jersey because he has spent a lifetime in amateur dramatics. Malcolm is from the bearded Icelandic sweater school of acting. Looking around the audience his school seems well represented. The rest of the audience is mostly made up of tight-lipped ladies with threatening horn-rimmed glasses and guys with ponytails and sagging t-shirts. Upper West Side intellectuals. Whatever will they make of Izzard?

I was prepared for something of a freak show. But I left not only having been highly entertained but convinced that Izzard’s one-person show has a serious purpose. It is a distillation of the conventional stage performance. A bit like drinking a strong spirit without a mixer. On that definition, Izzard was a Macallan 18. Strong stuff, but of the highest quality.

How goes the day with us on this Hamlet stage? Izzard performs within a blank, pink-lit square. Her female attire is subtle and not flamboyant. There are no props. Changing character is achieved by a turn of the head, a subtle look, running to a different corner of the stage, engaging the audience directly. 

It would be easy for the whole performance to spiral out of control, into Whitehall comedy farce, or for the characters to become confused during sharp shooting dialogue. But Izzard is a mistress of delivery, and the audience is never left in any doubt about which character is speaking.

Then, there is the issue of Izzard’s right and left hands. Characters all their own. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Unadorned, apart from deep red nail varnish, each hand, turned inwards, delivered its lines with oscillating fingers, turning this way and that. For older readers, think Harry Corbett manipulating Sooty and Sweep – but minus the glove puppets. Younger readers, hit the link.  

The result was extremely sharp dialogue and high-octane comedy, especially as the two ridiculous characters exited, and entered, scuttling right and left with a deft flourish of each hand.      

Part of the genius of this production is the revival of the Shakespearean tradition of audience engagement. After all, that was what Shakespeare’s Globe theatre was designed for. So, when Hamlet delivers his famous soliloquy, the lights focused on Izzard front of stage, and she confided in the audience. There was a dramatic reduction in tempo.  

Of course, Izzard always entertains. Her sly look at the audience while delivering a line that no politicians were to be trusted was doubly comical, as Izzard had hoped to be Labour’s candidate in Brighton for this year’s UK general election.

Nothing of dramatic purpose was lost in this production. If anything, the sharpness and speed of delivery heightened tension beyond what is to be expected in a more conventional approach. Cadell and Thompson have done a wonderful job of weaponizing Izzard. The audience’s attention never flags. Every line is hammered home. Diction is crystal clear.

I had been told to expect glitches and there were a few. Izzard was not word-perfect, and occasionally the dialogue would be interrupted by the word “Line,” immediately followed by a voice of God, backstage, providing a helpful prompt. No matter, it actually added to the fun of the preview. 

Over our coffee at The Smith on Lincoln Square – highly recommended as a spot for New York buzz – on the following Saturday I asked Cadell and Thompson, why on earth does Izzard do this? She has a well-established screen presence in the UK and beyond as comedian and commentator. Why risk that pathway to becoming a national treasure?

The answer was that Suzy Eddie Izzard feels compelled to perform Shakespeare. It is in the artistic DNA. I get that. So, the only remaining question is, does it work? After all, Florence Foster Jenkins had DNA riddled with singing, but could not perform. All the genomes, but not in the right order, as Eric Morecambe might have put it.

It does work. I left the Greenwich House Theatre with probably a sharper comprehension of Shakespeare’s Hamlet than I have gained over a lifetime of reading the text, watching stage plays and going to some excellent films. For an attention-deficit 21st-century audience this Hamlet will prove a godsend.

Even off-Broadway, in a sometimes-dodgy preview, Izzard’s Hamlet is a hit in the making. And the head-banging thought that could not be avoided in the cab run back uptown was, what other tricks does the artist and performer, Suzy Eddie Izzard have in the bag? And how many more names?  

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