Review: Eddie Izzard Finds Humanity and Humor in Hamlet

Given a different life, Eddie Izzard would have made an extraordinary English teacher — the kind who breathes life into characters during in-class readings and instills in students a lifelong love of the classics. This was clear enough in Izzard’s solo Great Expectations, but she solidifies her reputation in the solo Hamlet now at Greenwich House Theater. Making each verse crackle as she stalks through the audience, connecting with individual theatergoers, this is the kind of professor whose classes are always oversubscribed.

Izzard reunites with Great Expectations director Selina Cadell and brother Mark Izzard, who has crafted this beautifully cut adaptation of Hamlet, a play that often bumps up against the four-hour mark, but is a zippy two hours, 30 minutes here. I had wondered if Izzard’s solo performance of this greatest of Shakespearean dramas would work without the lubricant of narration, which did so much to channel the voice of Dickens into Izzard’s own gently wry style. It proves unnecessary here, with Izzard offering distinctive spins on every member of the court of Elsinore, popping in and out of them and breezily performing scenes opposite herself, much as she always has in her stand-up — and with results that are often as funny.

We don’t typically think of this tragedy about a melancholic Danish prince, usurped by his uncle and ordered to revenge by the ghost of his murdered father, as a laugh-riot. If Shakespeare is the very center of the Western Canon (as the great critic Harold Bloom forcefully argued), Hamlet stands out as a particularly complex and grim meditation on mortality and meaning — and directors are naturally prone to treat it with the reverence that seems to demand.

Happily, the Izzards and Cadell take a different approach, drawing out Hamlet’s Wittenberg wit and embracing a hearty sense of play. The line about the thrift of furnishing Claudius and Gertrude marriage table with “funeral baked meats” (so sensibly Danish) gets genuine laughs, as does Hamlet’s quip about the dead Polonius being “at supper.” Claudius has the outsize swagger of a little brother who has been practicing the role of King in the mirror for decades. Polonius has the faux confidence of a corporate consultant in way over his head. And Izzard represents Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by forming her hands into two puppets, mindlessly squawking “my lord.”

In this world of lightly drawn sketches, Hamlet and Ophelia emerge as the most fully-formed characters, both sighing “I shall obey” at different times in the play, both fully aware that their desires must take a back seat to duty. Izzard’s Hamlet is a politician, deploying his considerable intelligence, rhetorical ability, and swordsmanship to correct what he sees as a great injustice.  He confidently directs the players, “o’erstep not the modesty of Nature,” and we get a clear sense of a man who knows what he wants and has a plan to get it. Under different circumstances, he might have made a decent King. He is neither mad nor particularly indecisive — at least not when others are watching.

Doubt creeps in between scenes, as Hamlet stares out the narrow medieval windows of Tom Piper’s set, which suggests a sandstone prison (there are no doors). In these moments, Tyler Elrich gorgeously illuminates Hamlet’s face, the one he allows no one else to see: overwhelmed, unsure, undeniably human. Perhaps prompted by the mournful drums and trumpet of Eliza Thompson’s original music, Hamlet trudges on nonetheless, a slave to duty until the end.

Recent productions of Hamlet have excised Fortinbras, the ambitious and cunning crown prince of Norway, opting instead to treat Hamlet as a psychological family drama. But Izzard, who in addition to dabbling in politics has always shown a keen interest in history and statecraft in her stand-up, wisely restores him. The Izzards know very well that this is no ordinary family, but one with a sacred responsibility to the people over whom they rule. When that responsibility is shirked off in favor of palace intrigue, it isn’t too long before an alternative shows up on the scene. It’s a lesson our American ruling class ought to take to heart — but then again, perhaps their story is better told in another play.