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.

Theatre review: Great Expectations

A week ago I saw the spoof Bleak Expectations, this week it's the turn of the actual Charles Dickens (Chickens to his friends,) although there's times when this too feels like it's edging into parody, as a 19th century writer often lauded for his comedy gets it staged by one of the most beloved stand-ups of the 20th and 21st. If it wasn't for the ubiquity of A Christmas Carol, the melodrama Great Expectations would no doubt get the top spot as Chickens' most-adapted book - its most recent TV version was mainly talked about in terms of why there was any need for Olivia Colman to put on Miss Havisham's wedding dress when it was still lightly toasted from Gillian Anderson's turn. At least Selina Cadell's production has an unusual USP: Mark Izzard has adapted the story as a monologue for Eddie Izzard.