Venue:
Colchester Arts Centre
Date: 16/10/2025
Eddie Izzard has been touring the world with his single-handed performance of Hamlet since early 2024, and last night and tonight was Colchester’s turn. (I’ll stick to the name Eddie and male pronouns.) Seating was unreserved so a long queue wound around the deconsecrated church even though we arrived in time for the doors to open 30 minutes before showtime. We still managed to bag great seats dead centre and 5 rows back.
Eddie opens the evening by explaining that the intention is to strip away the distance between the icon of ‘Shakespeare’ and the audience, presenting the work new and raw as it would have been to a contemporary audience. He is not primarily known as an actor and the decision to perform Hamlet, playing every role himself, without props or scenery, is certainly brave, as well as a prodigious feat of memory. He is also, it must be said, not that great an actor. His range of tones is limited and the distinction between characters often slight, though his scenes as the mad Ophelia and the dying Hamlet are genuinely moving. But he is, of course, a superb comedian and it’s the comic touches which worked best, even if, as he mentions in his prologue, Hamlet could never be called a comedy. He has great fun with the gravediggers, and there are points when a sudden facial expression is enough to have the audience laughing.
To transfer between characters Eddie would often read one line, then literally jump to face the opposite direction. To signal a change of scene he would circle the stage, coming round to face the audience as a different character. This often worked surprisingly well, so long as you could keep up with who he was playing at any point. I did spend much of the second half wondering how he was going to manage to have a sword fight with himself in the climactic duel between Hamlet and Laertes. You’ll have to see the show yourself to find out, but fair to say it expends tremendous physical energy after two hours alone on stage.
My key takeaway from this profoundly bare production was how much of Hamet can be made a simple dialogue. Almost the only scenes were three characters have to converse are Hamlet’s discussions with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a difficulty Eddie gets around by using his hands to represent R+G (more laughter from the audience). Stripped of grand sets, sumptuous costumes, and even a cast in a play where the tradition is that only Claudius and the ghost are played by the same actor, the text becomes intimate and direct. It’s a performance which I am glad to have seen and would recommend, though not one I feel any urgent need to see again.
The audience:
Colchester is a university town and it’s a fair bet that there was a good showing from the Wivenhoe campus in attendance.
It made me think..
I last saw Hamlet 40 years ago. I was studying it for A level and my college took a trip to Manchester where Robert Lindasy was playing the Prince. Much more recently I heard a podcast where Lindsay was the guest, and he remembered looking down at the queue from his dressing room and complaining that most of them didn’t want to see Hamlet, they wanted to see Citizen Smith. As I recall whoever he was with said that they may have come to see Citizen Smith but Hamlet was what they were going to get, and it was Lindsay’s job to make sure that Hamlet was what they went away remembering. If anyone goes to this show expecting to see an Eddie Izzard routine they will recognize the familiar speech tones and pauses, but I would urge them to have at least a passing knowledge of the plot beforehand or they may not have a clue what is going on.
It really is a splendid venue. Brilliantly run, mostly staffed by volunteers and a really eclectic performance schedule. (And just ten miles down the road from me!)
15 minutes walk for us! It was my 4th visit this month (the wonderful classic horror nights for The Reptile, The Haar, Heidi Talbot and Hamlet). I admits that’s an unusually high turnout for me, but it’s great having such a wonderful venue in such easy reach.
Used to love his/her stand up from around 30 years ago, and this show does sound like a remarkable achievement but I can never quite decide whether I admire the hugely ambitious scale of Eddie’s projects or whether I find the ego behind such gargantuan self-belief slightly irritating. Whatever, I do find that the latter seems to have the upper hand these days. My loss I’m sure.
I did find him funny at first, but the mannerisms became a bit too much. The self-belief does seem to have backfired in his attempts to become an MP. He clearly thought that any constituency would be lucky to have him because he was famous. The Brighton and Sheffield Labour parties clearly preferred candidates who had been putting in the hours locally for years and not just dropping in surrounded by a cloud of self-importance.
Oddly, the other factor which he seemed to think would help in his campaigns, wearing women’s clothes, doesn’t seem to have worked for him. As he used to say himself, before he started on about gender fluidity or whatever, they’re just his clothes. It doesn’t really matter what you wear.
Very interesting, thanks Gatz.
“To, errr, be or not to be
THAT is the question “
“Errr…Shakespeare had of course originally wrote this about erm the BEES in his garden. Seeing how active they were, he wondered if they ever had an off day. Waking up with a hangover….after too much mead ….(mimes a bee reacting grumpily to an alarm clock – yawning and then stretching six limbs). He’s in his dressing gown, looking out of his tiny kitchen window … thinking “I’m not sure if I can be arsed being a bee today…but I
I have to because the Queen will have me killed by drones if I don’t.”
He played the ‘big 3’ (‘To be or not to be …’, ‘What a piece of work is man ..’ and ‘I have of late …’) fairly straightforwardly, though he missed a few words form the last of those, saying ‘I have of late lost all my mirth’ rather than, ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth’. I can only assume that was a lapse of memory and it jarred. It was weird to hear his ums and ers and distinctive emphases applied to Shakespearean verse.
I saw this last year in his home town, Bexhill. It was awful. It was a fundraising gig for the De La Warr Pavilion, which would go bust in under a month if it put on self-indulgent tripe like this without the celebrity name on the poster.
A one-person Hamlet is a daft idea in the first place, but the real problem is he can’t act. It’s not enough to say most of the words in roughly the right order. I’ve sat through a few Bad Hamlets in my time (even wrote me own bad version once) and this is by far – by a mile – the worst I’ve seen.
Slightly disappointed by his stand up a couple of years ago. Every dog has its day I suppose.
Was that Wunderbar? Yes, we were disappointed by that and it was the first time we saw him live.
Think it was The Remix, December ‘23.
Eddie Izzard in his pomp was sublimely good. A strong argument for the best – certainly top 10 of all time.
Sadly, those days seem past but he has acted well in a few things on the telly. I don’t think I’d pay to see him in a one man Hamlet though. Or even go for free.
I’ve seen a few but won’t be going to see the Tudor “Kevin The Teenager” play again. Especially in this staging. As Chiz says, it’s a very stupid idea to do this play as a one-hander.
I’d go to see it done as a panto, mind. “To be, or not to be..”, “oh no you aren’t.. I mean oh yes you are” etc.
Frankie Howard would have been superb in that panto version.
Titter ye not!
“Oh, phelia…please yourselves!”
Pilate: He has a wife, you know… Ophelia.
Guards: (suppressed giggles)
Pilate: Ophelia Buttox
He does like an audacious challenge and the political ambitions felt like that. “I’ll dress in female clothing, change my name to Suzy, wear a pink beret and lipstick on Question Time – and then l’ll become a member of parliament”. His contribution to the Brexit debate also wasn’t helpful in my view. Most people do want serious politicians, as it turns out.
I agree with a comment up there that he has been one of the top 5 in terms of stand-up comedy and I still very much like him.