Memory Cathedrals
From Denmark’s ghosts to Deep Space flashbacks
EDDIE, NOW SUZY, IZZARD WALKED out alone on Boston's Shubert stage recently and gave us a Hamlet that felt both timeworn and abstract. She plays history's omnipresent tragedy as one-person show, memory cathedral, and many selves leaping out of the same head. As with most of Izzard's work, you quickly forget yourself and fall into sharply etched situations where words spar like swordplay. Many pitch this play in the upper registers, ghosts spying on every scene—not only in the text, but on every stage. No one reads these lines anymore without several centuries listening in, wise to every trick. Izzard makes all this vanish somehow, and within minutes you're watching an elaborate allegory of trans rights—and Izzard’s own code-switching—braided through her colossal imagination. She doesn't make a big deal of this thespian triathlon, which somehow makes the feat bigger, more bracing. Dame Judi Dench gives it the perfect benediction: "Eddie's Hamlet is spectacular."
Izzard's Hamlet, which follows a turn at Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, blows past virtuoso stand-up into new rhythms. She renders this verse like it's been chipped out of some over-quoted statue and melted down to its primordial memes. Registers shift from supercilious "My Lords," suddenly fixed as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hand-puppets, to familiar soliloquies made new by energy, doubt, and constant transformation. To overly discreet lighting and pointedly stern music, Izzard stalks the stage hunting down every quiver in Hamlet's nerves, strewn among a cast of dim courtiers and a predatory, murderous king.
The Boston house fell hard for every scrap of comedy, leaning into punch lines like an audience auditioning for their performer, desperate to prove they're keeping up; this underlined Izzard's presence as Hamlet, the protagonist trailed by courtiers. Izzard stayed one notch cooler than the room, nursing a persistent cough. Only the gravedigger emerged with a ripe Cockney accent, her broadest choice and the only moment that resembled a "Cake or death?" set piece. Restraint shaped the rest: Polonius is less an overclocked buffoon than a bland bureaucrat, mired in his own certainties, and Claudius a guileful politician sizing up the next crime, so small that calling him conniving flatters the very idea of clever. Gertrude comes across as both motherly and implacably simple; when Hamlet declaims "Have you eyes?" it lands as a nose-on-your-face zinger.
How do you stage a mind in crisis for an audience jujitsued by social media, defaulting to “Please nag me with cat videos”?
Izzard’s Ophelia bruises the air. Her mad scenes arrive in a sing-song that tips between nursery rhyme and surrender from reason, sweetness and damage seesawing against one another. Hamlet's decision to "put an antic disposition on" is a luxury of intelligence, even sanity, and Izzard flips Hamelt’s most effective weapon into his biggest blunder once it hijacks Ophelia's heartbreak. A ghost has already stolen her soul. Hamlet is still the smartest person in most rooms, but in this staging that's not an automatic virtue; Izzard narrates the Prince’s implosion as it happens, the vessel for the ruptures in Denmark itself. The swordplay is clean and kinetic, the final carnage almost unwatchable, less because of invisible blood than because every fallen body reads as another casualty of the same actor's neurosis.
Izzard finds a universe within a single standing body; by contrast, Project Hail Mary builds an actual universe just to explore the same theme of a man talking to himself in the dark. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's film of Andy Weir's novel is another in the long line of "movies about movies," a high-concept soap plot amped up by light-speed amnesia, or "Let’s cross Interstellar with E.T." Gosling's scientist, Ryland Grace, wakes up alone on a ship, unaware he's been sent to stop a mysterious virus killing suns, and the movie traces a sequence of flashbacks: Every question finds its clue in a convenient memory insert from Earth. These rear-views functions much like Shakespeare's plot point soliloquies: breaks where the protagonist (and the filmmakers) tell us what’s really going on. Izzard conjures those moments with nothing but voice and pacing, while Project Hail Mary jumps from Gosling's irresistible smirk to his former self, bamboozled into a save-the-world coma.
At least a quarter too long and lousy with cliffhangers, the film even skimps Grace's backstory. It glides along on Gosling's shambolic charm, the same slightly abashed hints of dance that dappled La La Land and Barbie; like Matt Damon in The Martian (2015), he’s perpetually one wink away from letting on how easy it is to float inside an expensive movie set adrift. Izzard's music mostly distracts; Project Hail Mary travels a didactic playlist. Karaoke now works as the era's lagging "interior projection," and the film treats it as a character test: in movie grammar, singing periscopes an innermost self. The Beatles cue—"Two of Us," licensed to Amazon/MGM’s Jeff Bezos like one more billionaire-grade yacht—aligns the film with the ultimate pop canon. Author Andy Weir dedicated the novel to the band; the film simply rents the association. The closing blast of Tina Turner singing "Glory Glory" reeks of phony gospel uplift, the emotional surcharge paid at the exit to ensure the audience leaves feeling saved.
Each of these solo pirouettes addresses the same problem from opposite directions: how do you stage a mind in crisis for an audience jujitsued by social media, defaulting to "Please nag me with cat videos." Izzard gives us one person shape-shifting into 23 different selves; Project Hail Mary tilts into glibness, cutting between timelines and letting the right song at the right moment stand in for character. Izzard renews the stage's reverence for Shakespeare as overlord of consciousness, the eternal Elizabethan; Hollywood scoots by on a peculiarly harmless AI, cuddly alien Christ-figures, and killer charm. Both channel the dead still trying to talk us off our ledge.
more
Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard (Bluebird, 2017)
“More Noble Than Wise,” Jason Zinoman in the New York Times, February 13, 2024
“Eddie Izzard in 'Charles Dickens' Great Expectations',” Erin Kahn in StageBuddy, December 14, 2022
“To Thine Own Self Be True,” Binah Friedman in The Science Survey, July 5, 2024
Project Hail Mary: The Official Companion, by Andy Weir (Random House, 2021)
Around the Beatles on Track Star
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