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21:25Suzy Eddie Izzard is bringing honour to the women of Hamlet
In her new solo adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Suzy Eddie Izzard plays 23 characters, including men, women, ghosts, traitors, lovers and, of course, the Prince of Denmark himself.
Gender expression is something Izzard has been thinking about throughout her life and career. The British comedian and actor came out as transgender in 1985 and identifies as gender-fluid, so she has a unique perspective on how to approach both the male and female roles in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
“As a person who’s a trans person — and I grew up feeling I’d be quite happy to be a boy, quite happy to be girl — do we have to have this crowbarring separation?” Izzard says in an interview with Q guest host Garvia Bailey. “My logic is to have that basic chassis of myself, my own psyche, and then I add or subtract different attributes for each character…. If I had grown up as a girl and a young woman, how would I approach Ophelia? How would I play Ophelia?”
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Working together with her brother, Mark, and director Selina Cadell, Izzard cut the play to approximately two hours and 20 minutes (including intermission), down from its original four-hour runtime. The three agreed that their adaptation should “give honour” to Ophelia and Gertrude — the only two named female characters in Hamlet.
“If Shakespeare was around, I’d say, ‘Will, William, Bill, you under wrote Ophelia, you under wrote Gertrude. More meat on the bone, please.’” Izzard says. “To try and give Gertrude all the colours that she needs, and to give Ophelia all the colours that she needs, that’s what we wanted to do, even though they don’t have a lot of stage time.”
This isn’t Izzard’s first time embodying an entire literary classic alone on stage. A few years ago, she played 19 characters in an acclaimed solo adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. But she says these projects have nothing to do with challenging herself.
“I’m just trying to get to the roles that I wanted to do and I’m getting blocked from,” she says. “If you are a very attractive person — male, female, really good actor — you can green light these films and things will happen and [get] a lot of publicity, and that’s great. If not, the rest of us, which is 99 per cent of the world, we’ve got to do something a bit interesting to grab a bit of headlines.… So it’s not the challenges that I’m looking for, but I use the challenge technique to get through to just try and say, ‘Could you please look over here? Because I think I’m doing something quite interesting.’”
You can see Izzard’s solo adaptation of Hamlet at the CAA Theatre in Toronto from Feb. 25 to 28.
The full interview with Suzy Eddie Izzard is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Suzy Eddie Izzard produced by Nikky Manfredi.
