Every Hamlet is a failure. It always feels that way because playgoers tend to compare what they’re seeing with a superior version that exists only in their heads. And since disappointment is inevitable, it’s worth celebrating the successful novelties in Eddie Izzard’s solo version. He makes some valuable breakthroughs, especially in the comedic sections.
Izzard makes some valuable breakthroughs. His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s rare
His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s pretty rare. He plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as sock-puppets whose robotic yapping he imitates with his hands. Brilliant stuff. Well worth copying. His Osric is a greasy, cocktail-party flatterer with a faint Mexican accent. Osric, the Hispanic immigrant. That works too.
The show deserves top marks as a feat of acrobatics. All alone on the stage, Izzard manages to make sense of the complex and multi-layered ‘Mouse-Trap’ scene, (although it’s worth noting that this production is for connoisseurs only and will leave newcomers baffled). The swordfight in Act V becomes rather laborious because Izzard has to impersonate Claudius and Gertrude as well as the sweating, panting duellists. It seems very frantic rather than impressive but, to be fair, this climactic fight always drags on longer than necessary. And the staging is unhelpful to him throughout. The playing area is a vast pink oblong, like a sauna made of porcelain, devoid of ornaments or furnishings. It could be a dictator’s sarcophagus.
Izzard is more comfortable playing characters who are nearer his age. His Polonius is a hapless old duffer who hasn’t a clue that everyone finds him a bore. Claudius, his best role, is a stressed-out chief executive chasing around the stage, trying to quell a boardroom mutiny. The female characters are less successful. To imitate Gertrude and Ophelia he uses facile, girly gestures that indicate meekness and diffidence. As for the Dane, he plays him very correctly, very properly, like a precocious 12-year-old summoned to the headmaster’s office to impress the school governors. He speaks the lines perfectly well and he charts out an emotional journey for us but he seems to be tracing it on paper, not on his heart.
He’s chosen a costume that carries him far from the character of a youthful prince engaged in a deadly medieval feud. He wears black leather tights and a chunky green office jacket that amplifies his burly physique. His face make-up looks like Barbara Cartland’s: powdered jowls, crimson lipstick and heavy black circles around his eyes. If you spotted him out on a Friday night you’d think ‘there goes Angela Merkel on the pull’.
Izzard evidently adores the play and wants to share his enthusiasm with everyone else, but he delivers a coarse, bootleg version of the text. The ‘arras’ becomes the ‘curtain’ and ‘a bare bodkin’ turns into ‘a mere dagger’. The script is full of corruptions and mistranslations like this.
And when he calls Polonius a ‘tedious old git’ he risks turning the play into a shoddy pastiche aimed at philistines. He seems to forget that the audience is on his side, his partner, his equal. We’re with him, not beneath him. All the same, this is an excellent workshop performance which Izzard can build on by directing a full-scale version for everyone to enjoy. He can play the Ghost and Claudius (the roles that Shakespeare is said to have taken), and he can let more suitable actors perform the other parts. By hogging it all to himself, Izzard gives the impression that he’s greedier than the Bard.
Something of the outdoors clings to Dominic West. A sense of dew on his hair and dead thistles stuck to his cable-knit sweater. He could be an affable but slightly crumpled canoeing instructor. And yet there’s depth and soul to his acting. He does a brilliant turn as Eddie Carbone, the tortured protagonist in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.
Something of the outdoors clings to Dominic West. He could be an affable canoeing instructor
The play, perhaps Miller’s finest, is a version of Oedipus in reverse. Eddie has a secret passion for his niece, Catherine, who falls in love with a charismatic immigrant, Rodolpho. Eddie considers reporting Rodolpho to the authorities and getting him deported but he knows that this act of betrayal would destroy his public reputation. West’s towering performance reaches the heights set by Miller’s script.
Callum Scott Howells, as Rodolpho, faces quite a challenge playing a geeky clown who captivates the naive Catherine while irritating everybody else in sight. This he does well. He’s unbearable. And therefore brilliant. Lindsay Posner’s production is faultlessly presented. The costumes deserve an ovation for being so drab and cheerless. Everyone wears fraying hand-me-downs that don’t bear looking at twice. And the living spaces are palpably cheap, flimsy and ramshackle. It takes guts to put so much time and effort into such unshowy visuals.
This is one of the great plays. And this production does it full justice.
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