Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an intensely claustrophobic play. Set in a dreary Danish court, mired in a swamp of subtext-laden family drama, and lodged firmly within the lens of its famously neurotic protagonist, it can be a suffocating watch. It is doubly so when its eclectic cast of characters are all constrained to the repertoire of a single actress. But, while suffocation might sound like a bad thing, Eddie Izzard’s single-handed rendition of Hamlet transforms it into a revelatory force.
I admit that when I realized that the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s recent Hamlet production was not simply the famous British actress Eddie Izzard playing Prince Hamlet, but rather Eddie Izzard singlehandedly performing the entirety of Hamlet, I had low hopes. I expected the performance to be confusing at best and unendurably awful at worst. However, Eddie Izzard startled me by revealing, through a frankly marvelous performance, a side of Hamlet that I had not seen before. Her version demonstrates that, while Hamlet might be about poetry, family dysfunction, and Danish politics, it is equally a play about mental illness, depression, insanity, and what it means to be trapped in one’s own head by grief.
In one of the play’s most famous lines, upon being informed of his uncle’s role in his father’s death, Hamlet proclaims that “[t]he time is out of joint,” and that he, by avenging his father, must make it right. The time is out of joint not because it has stopped moving, but because Hamlet—and many of the play’s other characters—are unable to move with it. This timelessness is situated in the characters’ experiences of loss, rather than, as Fortinbras’s approaching army ably demonstrates, any genuine stability in Denmark. Mental illness plagues the play, both real in Ophelia’s case, and feigned, in Hamlet’s, though the line between truth and artifice grows increasingly ambiguous. By the end of the first act, Hamlet’s own sanity lies in question.
Izzard brings these themes to the forefront of her rendition. From the outset, the stage design, reminiscent of an insane asylum, brings to mind themes of mental instability. White walls, a white floor, and bright floodlights welcome Izzard, clad in a black ensemble that I can best describe as a cross between Elizabethan male garb and a straitjacket. Given that Izzard herself is the only person present for the entirety of the performance, her motion back and forth across the stage, ducking between different characters, evokes not an entire cast of actors, but a tormented individual in the midst of exhausted ravings.
While Izzard’s performance can at times appear confusing—some of the characters are not differentiable, especially post-intermission—she nevertheless shines with several figures. Polonius and Claudius are fairly clear, the former comically pedantic and the latter appropriately villainous, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (rendered via hand-puppets) never failed to elicit laughter from the audience. Generally, Izzard shines with regards to humor; she spoke the Elizabethan lines with such easy fluency that I might as well have been watching a modern comedy. The “Gravedigger” scene is a particular highlight; the whole audience roared.
Most of Izzard’s crowning moments occur in humor. Nevertheless, she manages to also evoke real poignancy, particularly in the interactions between Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet’s command for Ophelia to seek a nunnery sent a quiet chill running through the viewers; the whole audience was dead silent during the portrayal of Ophelia’s breakdown and eventual suicide. Meanwhile, Izzard allows glimmers of Hamlet’s own grief to shine through at times in particularly moving ways. I was especially impressed by Izzard’s recitation of the “quintessence of dust” oration.
If Izzard never successfully differentiates all the characters she plays, this becomes more virtue than fault towards the end. Post-intermission, it becomes easy even for someone who knows the play very well to wonder which character is reciting which line. Just as Hamlet is trapped in his own grief, the audience becomes trapped further and further within the bounds of Izzard’s tormented performance.
This performance can be hard to watch. Izzard breaks the fourth wall a few times during the play, often to comic effect, but there always exists a tacit understanding of an unbridgeable separation between her and the audience. This becomes nowhere more visible than in the final fight scene between Hamlet and Ophelia’s vengeful brother Laertes. To display the behavior of the two similarly motivated combatants, Izzard literally hurls herself repeatedly against the walls of the stage. Hands pressed against the arms of my chair, I wanted to ask her to stop. To sit down. To not hurt herself that way. But of course, I could do none of those things. With the rest of the audience, I watched in silence as Izzard’s Hamlet died, as the tragedy ended, as time was set back in joint once more. The process of recovery, or the lack thereof, is a lonely one in Izzard’s depiction; the only person who can reach a mind in crisis is that very mind itself.
While Izzard’s performance is imperfect, it is nevertheless a remarkable feat for a single actress and a genuinely moving one. It transformed the way in which I perceive Hamlet, as less a play about political maneuvering than a depiction of the anguish of a single young man. The ending left me distressed, yet also with a sense of catharsis; it is rare for me to be so impacted by a production. I am certain that others will feel similarly upon a viewing.
Hamlet played at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater through May 4, 2024.
