In case you haven’t heard, Suzy Eddie Izzard (her preferred name now) is touring a production of Hamlet in which she plays all 23 characters. She and her brother Mark started working on it two years ago, and brought it to Boston last weekend. My wife and I heard about it a few days before and were able to get tickets.
I’ve been a huge fan of Eddie since seeing the standup show Dress To Kill (1998). I’ve seen most of her other standup shows on video, and one live one here in Boston a few years ago. I’ve also followed her acting roles in shows like The Riches (2007) and movies like My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007). I was amazed by her incredible life story in the documentary, Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story (2009).
So I’m not coming to this review with any animosity towards her. Far from it.
First off, there is much good about the production: the lighting is amazing and and in combination with the minimalist set gives Izzard a versatile space to work in. And needless to say, memorizing and performing the speeches of every character, even in a cut-down version of Shakespeare’s longest play, is an astonishing achievement. It is a tour-de-force.
But…
There are so many problems. Izzard addresses one potential problem in a brief speech before the show, saying that if anyone came to the show expecting comedy, they are going to be “violently disabused” of that notion pretty quickly.
Except that we weren’t, exactly. She played many scenes for laughs that few other productions would. The most notable are all those with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom she plays as sock puppets without the socks (as one reviewer put it). This got big laughs the first time they appeared, and giggles almost every other time as well. To be sure, Hamlet is often mocking R&G, so there is an element of humor in those scenes, but this technique turned the pair into a running gag.
Even in scenes that weren’t at all funny, the way Izzard moved often echoed the moves made in her standup routines, which I occasionally found jarring.
There is also the question of distinguishing who is speaking. She used the standard trick of making a half-turn to indicate changes of personae, but they weren’t always clear. Although Izzard made some slight changes in voice, accent, and posture to differentiate the characters, they were relatively subtle. I expected more of a range, and clearer distinctions. My wife and I are quite familiar with the play, and could usually tell who was who, but anyone who wasn’t would probably have been very confused.
One of the best parts of the show was the graveyard scene, which was written as comic, and therefore worked to Izzard’s strengths. She put on one of her most distinctive voices for the gravedigger and played the character broadly.
Many comedians have shown themselves to be skilled dramatic actors. I have not seen enough of Izzard’s previous straight dramatic work to say whether she belongs with Peter Sellers, Robin Williams, and others of that caliber. But seeing this, it is my opinion that she is not a great Shakespearean stage actor.
I could say more, but I’ll close with my biggest disappointment: the final scene. The climax of the play is the sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes in which all the major characters are killed. (Spoiler alert?) Aside from the fight itself, there is so much going on simultaneously that simply cannot be portrayed by one person. The horror and pathos of the scene as written simply didn’t come through in this production.
I commend Izzard for taking an incredible risk and doing the extremely hard work of trying something that AFAIK has never been done before.
But I came out of the theater thinking of the sexist quote from Samuel Johnson in which he compared women preaching to a dog walking on its back legs. “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”