There Will Be No Kings: Eddie Izzard’s Intimate and Unconventional Tragedy
By • April 6, 2026 0 296
By Ryan Allen & Catherine Meale
Eddie Izzard’s staggering solo performance of “The Tragedy of Hamlet” at Shakespeare Theatre Company, in which she takes on every one of 23 characters before a single stripped-down set, is far from a traditional production. Thank heavens, because what a tragedy that would be.
No sooner does Izzard take the stage than she breaks the fourth wall. She tells us that her career has followed the same trajectory as Shakespeare’s: from tragedy to comedy. She assures the audience that this is not a comedic performance. It is a tragedy, a family tearing itself apart and taking the kingdom with it. She wraps up with, “at the end of this performance, there will be no kings,” a line that evoked hearty laughter from those in attendance.
Tragedy made an appearance early on in Izzard’s life. Her beloved mother died when Izzard was just 6 years old. At 7, she decided to become an actor. She cites her never-ending quest to bring back her mother as part of her inspiration. Unlike indecisive Hamlet, Izzard does not suffer from procrastination. She worked tirelessly over decades to transform her early grief into a successful career as an actor and—more importantly—an authentic life.
Assigned male at birth in 1962, Izzard knew from the age of 4 that she was transgender. In her memoir “Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens,” she called herself as an “action transvestite” and started performing openly as such in her first major solo show in 1993. She began referring to herself as transgender in 2020, using she/her pronouns and taking on the name Suzy but professionally still goes by Eddie Izzard. Izzard credits her strength as a performer in no small part to the experiences that forged her and her identity as a transgender performer complements the physical fluidity and psychological complexity that is inherent to a one-person production of Hamlet.
To be clear, however, this is a dramatic performance, and the tale remains as it always has been. The ghost of Old Hamlet, the late King of Denmark and Hamlet’s father, has been haunting the ramparts of Elsinore at night, an escape from the days he spends in purgatory. Hamlet confronts the ghost and learns that his Uncle Claudius has killed his father in order to marry Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and assume the throne. The ghost asks Hamlet to avenge him, and Hamlet swears he will. In the pursuit of vengeance, Hamlet feigns insanity, scorns Ophelia, kills her father, is swiftly dispatched to England then returns to a climactic fencing duel, in which he kills Laertes and the King, and by which he and his mother are poisoned.
Eddie Izzard takes on all 23 characters. Photo by Amanda Searle.
What makes this production different is all Izzard. She draws on her varied career, somehow both eclectic and driven, to innovate and deliver a deeply human performance of every character in the play. Izzard pulls from everything: from her comedic ensemble performances at the Edinburg Fringe Festival, multiple iterations of her street act in Covent Garden involving unicycles, escapology and relevantly, swordplay, to a very successful stand-up career and finally into dramatic roles on stage and screen.
In stand-up, Izzard’s voice has always been plural, shifting characters, perspectives and tones mid-thought. In “The Tragedy of Hamlet”, Izzard adeptly transfers these skills to portray each of the 23 characters. Scene by scene, Izzard distinguishes characters by her vocal delivery and body movement—lots of movement. As in her comedy here too, she utilizes physical gestures and mannerisms to differentiate the characters. Claudius snaps his fingers. Polonius limps. Izzard whirls and turns, shifts her position, posture and expression. It’s a marathon performance which suits Izzard who once ran 27 marathons in 27 days through South Africa to raise money for charity and in honor of Nelson Mandela and the 27 years he spent in prison.
Vocal changes too, like tone, pitch and accents also help to covey the rapid shifts between speakers. Claudius speaks in the stentorian tones of a king. The speech of Old Hamlet’s ghost carries something of the underworld with it. Fortinbras, that Norseman, has a distinctly Scottish lilt. Overall, these techniques work extremely well but a climax involving a sword fight, stabbings of various depths and a handful of poisonings is a big ask for a single human. For those who haven’t read or watched Hamlet in a while, it’s worth familiarizing oneself with the storyline and characters before attending.
Izzard’s strength is that while she delivers Shakespeare’s language beautifully, she puts the focus of her speech on the full and vulnerable humanity of Shakespeare’s characters. When Izzard’s Hamlet asks, “to be or not to be,” he isn’t a philosopher, scholar or worse, an actor. He’s a young man, overwhelmed by the loss of his father and the “oe’r hasty” marriage of his mother, facing a “sea of troubles.”
Izzard’s Ophelia delivers the same pathos. We see Ophelia alive one last time after Hamlet has scorned her, murdered her father and driven her from her wits. She sings beautifully and beats her breast and our heart breaks with hers.
In comedic scenes, the combination of Izzard and Shakespeare is arguably unbeatable. Izzard’s rendition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern delights. Hamlet’s traitorous childhood friends are brilliantly reduced to “hand puppets,” with Izzard manipulating her fingers to represent their speech. In another unexpected comedic highlight, Izzard astutely develops the humor of the play-within-a-play scene by giving us a wooden, so-bad-its-good performance of the performers.
Izzard’s comedy genius shines irrefutably in a churchyard scene. In this scene, Hamlet stumbles upon two gravediggers—broad characters, represented by different regional accents, not particularly concerned with how well the graves are dug. The humor is verbal and physical, and a perfect union between Shakespeare’s language and Izzard’s comedic sensibilities. The gravediggers exchange jokes and Izzard mimes jumping into the grave and manhandling a local skull (alas, in the next beat, Hamlet will discover that this is the skull of Yorik, the court jester with whom he played with as a child). The scene is written to be funny, and Izzard knocks it out of the cemetery. Together, Izzard and Shakespeare may rival one of Izzard’s comedy heroes, Monty Python.
Izzard may have performed all the parts, but she has not done it alone. This production is a successful collaboration with her creative team, many of which she has worked with previously. Her older brother Mark Izzard adapted Shakespeare’s original text into a fast, narrative-focused 2-hour script. Selina Cadell directed and is credited with focusing on the text and performance (rather than props and scenery) as well as acknowledging the audience as an active part of the experience. Furthermore, rather than use a traditional costumed actor, skillful lighting and sound conjure the King’s ghost, keeping the emotional focus on Hamlet’s reaction to the shocking news of his father’s murder and the weight of his revenge.
Through this remarkable collaboration and her own boundless theatrical stamina, Izzard transforms Shakespeare’s classic tragedy into a profoundly intimate and unforgettable solo triumph.
The Tragedy of Hamlet
Shakespeare Theatre Company, Klein Theatre
Extended until April 11, 2026
