Theatre review: Hamlet (Riverside Studios)

Following last year's solo Great Expectations, Eddie Izzard returns to the stage, once again with her older brother Mark adapting a famous work into a monologue. This time, though, instead of a novel with a fair amount of first-person narration to keep the story going, it's Shakespeare's most lauded tragedy Hamlet, a story that's already written for the stage. So the source material is all dialogue, leaving it entirely down to the performer to make sure the audience knows who's saying what to whom. Eddie Izzard does of course have a lot of acting credits but remains best known as a comedian, and if she's previously performed Shakespeare professionally I can't find any reference to it, so this endeavour has to fall somewhere between ambitious and foolhardy, with the distinct possibility of coming across as pure vanity project. What we get in the end is a little bit of all of the above.

Tom Piper's set is a minimal white marble box, which Tyler Elich's lighting drowns in green to signal the arrival of a ghost on the battlements of the castle. It's the late king, who's back to say he was murdered by his brother, who went on to usurp his throne and queen.

When Prince Hamlet learns this from his father's ghost he swears revenge, but spends much of the play dithering and trying to get proof of his uncle's crimes before acting on them. It's a famous story, but not to everyone, and my general impression is that someone who didn't know it going in would be able to follow the broad sweep of the plot - they'd certainly figure out that it ends with a fencing match gone wrong - but probably not much of the complexity.

That comes in part from Mark Izzard's fairly comprehensive but sometimes eccentric text edit, which as well as cutting anything extraneous also goes in for a lot of paraphrasing, some of it quite interesting, some of it perhaps underestimating the audience's ability to infer from context. As with Great Expectations, this show never quite feels like it's escaped from Izzard's stand-up - even Piper and Libby Da Costa's costume design gives her a silhouette similar to those from decades' worth of comedy specials - and once again I kept expecting James Mason and Mrs Badcrumble to show up. And I'm not saying that, in the Ghost and Fortinbras respectively, they do but... I'm not saying they don't either. Fortinbras turning up in the first place is one of those eccentric touches, as a heavily-edited text for a single performer would suggest a "domestic" Hamlet that cuts out the politics would be a simpler proposition. Fortinbras being kept doesn't really contribute anything, other than the King of Norway being played as an elderly Scottish clarinet teacher.

There were two things I most missed from Selina Cadell's production, and they're connected: One is that there's nothing approaching an overall theme or opinion of the play as a whole, no connective tissue to what makes this version of the story worth telling. The other is that there's not enough distinction between the characters, either vocally or physically - Polonius gets a limp, but as Izzard's constantly spinning around the stage to move into a different character, that's not even something that registers much. In some ways it's a tour de force, but it won't be threatening Andrew Scott's crown for bringing an entire play's cast to individual life. As for Hamlet himself, I got no impression at all of what we were supposed to make of the central character.

There are a couple of pluses and they're big ones: If we don't get a clear take on Hamlet, at least it's not the bleak and unlikeable interpretation that's been prevalent recently. Unsurprisingly from Izzard, what we do get is every bit of humour in the play - and there's a lot - brought to the fore. The highlight is the exchange between Hamlet and the gravedigger, which you could believe had been written for Izzard to perform as a conversation with herself. And actually, when delivering the soliloquies - sometimes wandering around the audience - Izzard proves to have a real understanding of Shakespeare's language and skill at making it clear, that would be good to see in a more traditional, more focused form. I actually thought someone should cast Izzard as Paulina, and anyone who knows my thoughts on The Winter's Tale knows what kind of compliment that is. I'm pretty convinced Izzard has some strong Shakespearean performances in her. Just not all of them, all at once.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, adapted by Mark Izzard, is booking until the 30th of June at Riverside Studio 2.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.