By Helen Musa

Comedian Suzy Eddie Izzard is happy to admit she’s only got half a brain, the full brain belonging to her clever brother Mark, or so she says she’s been told since childhood.

She’s equally happy to say: “I’m a complete boy plus half a girl”, and since then has used the name Suzy in addition to Eddie, explaining that she had wanted to use that name since she was 10 years old.

Izzard will be at The Playhouse soon with her sensational production, The Tragedy of Hamlet – yes, that’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Taking a leaf out of the book of Elizabethan staging, Izzard performs on a bare stage, letting Shakespeare’s words and storytelling take the spotlight.

Adapted by her brainy brother Mark Izzard and directed by Selina Cadell, it sees Izzard play all 23 characters in what is possibly the world’s most famous drama.

As Prince Hamlet determines to take revenge for the death of her father, Old Hamlet, she portrays men, women, a ghost, scholars, a tyrant, courtiers, lovers, fools and poets.

The production has been touring since 2024 and is Izzard’s second solo production, following her smash-hit version of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Mark, armed with the three extant versions of Hamlet – the First Quarto, the Second Quarto and the First Folio – simply chose what he wanted to keep. Presumably not the First Quarto’s notorious line, “To be, or not to be – ay, there’s the point”.

“I said, let my brother choose it and then I acted it,” Izzard tells me.

Izzard lost her mother Dorothy at the age of six, but found an emotional connection through theatre.

“I pushed in a single-minded way to be an actor… you have to connect well with an audience, but when at school, where we used to read out plays in class, it was pretty hard.”

Not to worry. Determination paid off and, after enrolling at the University of Sheffield, she turned to drama, regularly performing at the university’s drama studio. She eventually received an honorary doctorate from the university in 2006.

An illustrious career followed, in which Izzard perfected her talent for connecting with audiences, starring in celebrated stand-up shows including Live at the Ambassadors, Dress to Kill, Circle, Force Majeure and Wunderbar.

Beyond comedy, she has starred in the television series The Riches, appeared in films including the Ocean’s series, Valkyrie, Absolutely Anything and Six Minutes to Midnight.

It should also be said that Izzard is a very public personality in Britain. In 2009 she completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief. She has performed stand-up in Arabic, French, German, Russian and Spanish, and is an active supporter of Europeanism and the European Union. A dedicated Labour Party activist, she twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s National Executive Committee before joining it as the highest-polling unelected candidate in 2018.

After the huge success of Great Expectations, Izzard announced that she was going to do Hamlet.

“It was semi-controversial, but the audiences loved it,” she tells me, adding that by now, well over 100,000 people have seen The Tragedy of Hamlet.

“In theatre you don’t tell a story, you have to show it, so I look at what Shakespeare has written. As an actor you have to make your own choices, you have to make it your Hamlet and, after many tries, I realised I was getting to that place where I could convey the emotion.”

Of course, she was hardly going to do the five-hour version of Hamlet, but she does have some favourite scenes, especially the “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” soliloquy. “So many changes of gear, where you get applause for doing what you do.”

In another coup de théâtre, Hamlet’s old schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are represented by two hand puppets. Given that they are the puppets of King Claudius, it’s not a bad idea, she figures.

Another favourite scene is when Hamlet comes across Claudius attempting to pray and pulls back. “I get to play both Hamlet and the King and I have adjusted it so that I’m always fine with that,” she says. 

“It keeps it alive all the time.”

The Tragedy of Hamlet, at The Playhouse, July 31-August 1.

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