To create a thrilling kind of ‘Hamlet,’ Eddie Izzard decided to go it alone

When Eddie Izzard decided to stage a solo performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” – playing everyone from the title character to Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – no one said it would be easy.

But while it would be challenging, Izzard says the idea wasn’t just for a challenge.

Instead, Izzard, who uses she/her pronouns, hopes to breathe new life, or a different life, into the theater experience, which she says has come to be seen by many as something that’s supposed to be good for you, if hard to swallow.

“There’s this thing of ‘spinach theater’ that some people articulate of Shakespeare, that it should be very tough and difficult to understand,” Izzard says on a recent video call from her home in London. “I don’t think that’s what he was trying to write.

“I don’t think anyone in those times, or any good writers, are trying to write things that are difficult,” she says. “It can be layered. It can be beautiful. You can choose words to articulate things that are completely not the words you would expect to use, and that is great poetry.

“But not obtuse. Not like going, ‘What?’ And unfortunately, a lot of people go, ‘What?’ because time has passed and certain references get lost.”

So Izzard, whose brother Mark Izzard adapted “Hamlet” for solo performance, set out to make “Hamlet” a tale of flesh and blood again.

“We want this visceral reaction, which the audience had back in Shakespeare’s time,” Izzard says. “I just do not think he was writing to say, ‘They’re really confused today. It’s fantastic! They haven’t got a clue what I’ve written.’

“I just don’t think he was doing that,” she says. “I wanted the kids from 9 to 90 to be able to grab it.

“So now we’re 205 shows down, 50,000 tickets sold,” Izzard continues. “Australia lining up, India lining up, New Zealand. Take it around the world – Japan, they love their Shakespeare.

“Bring it to France. Do it in English, but do the soliloquies in French, maybe. ‘Être ou ne pas être, telle est la question.’ Maybe Germany. ‘Sein oder nicht sein, das ist hier die Frage.’

“You know, why not?”

Back to the start

As a child, Izzard saw her first play a month before her eighth birthday and knew in that moment she wanted to act. But dyslexia made sight-reading lines in auditions almost impossible. As a young adult, she turned to stand-up comedy, mostly performing on the streets of London, where if you were good, people stopped to watch, and if you were not, off they strode.

It was training, Izzard says, that in a way harkens back to that of the Shakespearean actors who first breathed life into Will’s words at the Globe Theatre at the dawn of the 17th century.

“You’re talking to an audience that can move away at any point,” she says of street performance. “That’s the same as what Shakespeare’s actors had.

“They were, just a generation before, performing only in marketplaces, at festivals,” Izzard says. “The first theater, The Theatre, and then the Curtain Theatre, opened in 1576, ’77. Their training would have been the same as my training.

“There’s a certain elite thing that Shakespeare’s gone to today. Maybe Shakespeare would like that, but I don’t think it’s helpful. I think he wanted the audience, the groundlings [Elizabethan theatergoers who, for a penny, could stand in the pit at the front of the stage.]

“What’s the point of having the groundlings there if they’re all going: ‘Boo! What the hell is this? I guess this is obtuse. I’ve just looked the word up in the dictionary, which doesn’t exist at this point.’”

Learning lines

In 2022, Izzard did her first solo theater piece, performing Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” Even after Mark Izzard cut the 180,000-word novel down to a two-hour show, it was a lot of dialogue to learn.

“‘Great Expectations,’ I learned from the back,” she says. “The first time I did it, I read the whole play, then I did the last two minutes from memory. Then the next day, I did another two minutes, so I did four minutes from memory. And then six minutes.

“‘Hamlet’ you could not do that,” Izzard continues. “It is a play, and you had to learn a scene before you could rehearse the scene, and then the next scene and the next. So that was significantly harder.

“Now I don’t ask for lines [if she loses her place in performance]. I know the story, and if I come off the exact script of where the character should be, I will estimate my way back onto the tramlines, onto the railway lines of where I am going.

“No safety net, but I live, I burn very brightly out there.”

Occasionally, an audience member won’t understand what the solo performance entails, Izzard says.

“I’m very confident I will take people somewhere that’s going to be interesting,” Izzard says. “Some people won’t, it’s not for them. They’ll say, ‘Where’s all the other actors?’ Well, there aren’t any others; it’s a solo performance. Some people just stomp out.”

Most stay, and for their attention, are rewarded with a different, possibly deeper glimpse into the heart of the play, she says.

“This is where you can really hone in on the play, the dialogue, and the characters in Shakespeare’s words and work,” Izzard says. “So yeah, I’m loving doing it after 205 performances.”

Multitudes in movement

Izzard didn’t just have to learn all the lines of 30 or more characters in “Hamlet.” She had to also figure out how to move around the stage as each of them spoke to themselves, another character, or a group.

“I haven’t actually seen all the other solo performers doing [recent solo plays],” she says. “But sometimes they use screens or scrims, and they have videos and can talk to characters that are not there.

“I developed a way of talking to characters … from my comedy,” Izzard says, describing simple movements from one character’s position to another’s and back again as a conversation unfolds.

“I’m very strict on the architecture of it,” she says. “Selina [Cadell, Izzard’s director] was very keen on this. It has to be at a certain angle toward the audience. Then you flip to the other side, and you’re playing to the [first] character. You change physicality, and you change voice as you flip forward.

“Sometimes, there would be three [characters]. Sometimes it is Claudius, Hamlet and Gertrude. In Act 2, there are five characters interacting quite quickly with Polonius coming in and Laertes coming in.

“As I move around the stage, if one character moves, their blocking has to come back to where they left the other character,” Izzard says. “If Gertrude wanders off and then comes back saying, ‘You know that people move through nature to eternity; that’s what’s happened to your father,’ by the time she gets back to the same place, Hamlet is still there.”

The way to Will

As a child with dyslexia, who was muddled by the rhyme and meter of Elizabethan poetry, Izzard says she definitely didn’t fit the stereotype of every British person born to love the Bard.

“This is part of the Atlantic being a magical ocean, in that America might view most British as very cultured, all related to Shakespeare, all sons and daughters of kings and queens or bastard children or something,” she says, laughing. “And we think you guys are all multimillionaires, a diamond as big as the Ritz, with 53 cars and maybe a spaceship in the back garden.

“These things are not true,” Izzard says. “My relationship [with Shakespeare] was maybe like any other kids at school. I did ‘The Comedy of Errors.’ I did it in Latin as well, ‘The Two Menaechmuses,’ which is what [Shakespeare] took the source play from.”

But Izzard says she was intimidated by Shakespeare as a youth.

“I really put a block on it,” she says. “And it was watching [Roman] Polanski’s ‘Macbeth’ I thought, ‘Whoa, that’s an action movie.’

“I am an emotional watcher of films and theater. I’m not someone who approaches things from an intellectual point of view. So that is what got me going on that. Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo and Juliet’ – again, very visceral, very emotional, very grabbable, but still the beauty of the poetry.”

The age of Hamlet

“Hamlet” was not Izzard’s first choice for a solo performance of Shakespeare. She’d looked first to “Richard III,” and then considered “Macbeth.”

“But as soon as I started rehearsing ‘Hamlet,’ I felt very at home,” she says. “I remember somebody saying … ‘On my God, I’m now at the age where I’ll probably never play Hamlet.’  That wasn’t something that was troubling me, but it’s great being able to play Hamlet.

“I said to Ian McKellan, before he’d done his reboot of ‘Hamlet’ at 81, 82, I met him at a party, and I said, ‘Ian, how old can you be to do Hamlet?’” Izzard says, then slipping into a gruff imitation of McKellan’s voice: “‘Any age, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.’”

Of course, Izzard, at 63, plays characters across a wide range of ages in this “Hamlet,” with several of them vying for favorite standing to him.

“I do like Hamlet, but also Ophelia,” she says. “People have been very happy with how I’m portraying Ophelia. Somebody said after a very early performance, ‘I see them as twin souls,’ and that is a very interesting point of view that we wanted to bring out.

“Gertrude is just lying all the way through,” Izzard continues. “She gets more interest when, just before our interval, Hamlet gets through to her that ‘it is not madness’ but I am playing in madness.

“And then she says, ‘And breath of life, I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me.’ That’s a beautiful couple of lines there, and then she’s becoming real and becoming truthful.”

Taken somewhere

Audiences and critics have praised Izzard’s “Hamlet” in performances since its debut in 2024. Sometimes it’s just a guy on the street, she says.

“People stop me at Victoria Station, the station near me,” Izzard says. “They went past me just before Christmas and then came running back. He said, ‘I saw you in Hereford. It’s really good.’

“I thought that’s great. This is a guy, I don’t know what his relationship with Shakespeare is, it doesn’t matter. It just means I got out there and grabbed him, and he wanted to run back and say something.”

Other times it is a famous friend, like Dame Judi Dench, whose description of the production as “spectacular” is now in the publicity materials.

“I had done a couple of films with her, and she had come to my comedy,” Izzard says. “I didn’t ask her for the quote, but she gave it, and I said, ‘Judi, can I use it?’

“I’m not sure what she was expecting,” she says. “But she loves her Shakespeare. She’d just written her book [“Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent”]. She gave me a copy of it before I went off to do it.

“She said, ‘Don’t [bleep] it up,’ and I don’t feel I have [bleeped] it up.”

And so Izzard continues, walking onto the stage each night hoping to make a visceral connection with the audience, leaving everything she’s got in those moments.

“I come out there and leave it all out on the stage,” she says. “Just say, ‘Here we go. Just hang on, I’m going to take you somewhere.’”

Eddie Izzard’s ‘Hamlet’

When: Jan. 22-31

Where: The Montalban Theatre, 1615 Vine St., Hollywood

How much: $97-$139

For more: www.eddieizzardhamlet.com