Hamlet, Riverside Studios, review: A rather average Eddie Izzard fits-all performance
When contemplating Eddie Izzard’s latest theatrical foray those wistful, self-aware lines in the TS Eliot poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock spring to mind: “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; /Am an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two…/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous - /Almost, at times, the Fool.”
Was Izzard meant to be Prince Hamlet, having for such a long time played the Fool, one who has made the multitudes – and perhaps the odd potentate – roar with laughter, as did poor Yorick? On the bucket-list now for this former busker turned arena-playing high achiever is the greatest classical role in the canon. What a nerve.
Not only Hamlet, but the attendant lords, Claudius, Gertrude and the rest. This is a one-Eddie fits-all evening, in which 23 characters are assayed in a version mercilessly hacked by older brother Mark, who had a hand in the recent, well-received Izzardian account of Great Expectations.
It has already been seen off-Broadway this year, where Diane Snyder, evaluating for The Telegraph, took an appreciative view of the endeavour, directed by Selina Cadell. I wish I could be equally enthusiastic. The dividends here, besides cheering on the admired trans pioneer (whose preferred pronouns are female) in a daunting test of stamina, textual focus and gender-flipping, seem pretty minimal.
To be fair it’s not a totally daft idea making Hamlet the vehicle for a single actor – after all, it’s a play about madness, and you can picture an ageing, perhaps asylum-incarcerated figure revisiting Hamlet’s past actions, and inactions, like some purgatorial vision of self-haunting and tormenting.
Despite an imposing, confining Elsinore set design of cream stone slabs with three window slits, nothing of such interpretative novelty is presented here, though. Instead, with fusty clarion sounds, the artistic invitation is a straightforward precis, efficiently and lucidly executed, but lacking much interiority and passion.
Having run umpteen marathons over the past few years, it’s perhaps not surprising that Izzard’s greatest asset here is fancy footwork. Leg muscles trimly apparent in skin-tight black trousers and sporting a skirt-effect jacket busting with the suggestion of a bosom, she twists this way and that as she cuts – at the risk of bamboozlement - between cursorily delineated personae: a limp for Polonius, something fey for Ophelia.
Twirling and whirling, prancing and dancing, this fleet, role-flitting approach is a staple of Izzard’s stand-up but it’s done to the hilt and the doggedly laborious mimed two-sided sword fight in the second half has a compulsive, Pythonesque quality of grunting interminability.
Overall, it’s an impressive feat of memory, control and endurance. Still, something’s a bit rotten with the state of a production when the soliloquies - sane, sad and sincere though they be, with the odd hint of ham and whiff of James Mason - are less impactful than the incidentals: the funny business with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – conveyed, literally, by bare handiwork – the eerie, chest-thumping account of Ophelia’s sorrowful sing-song, and the grave-digger’s cockney backchat, redolent of Cook and Moore.
The enterprise comes full circle: Eddie’s nothing really like a Dane, a bit like a dame, and a lot like an old-fashioned trouper – a figure of some tragic capacity, yes, but a fellow, finally and most cherishably, of infinite jest.
Until June 30. Tickets: riversidestudios.co.uk
