Eddie Izzard is an interesting character: she’s transgender, a stand-up comedian, dyslexic, and a Shakespearian actor poised to play 23 roles in Hamlet at The Playhouse (31 July-1 August).

Just like the bare stage that Izzard will perform on (no prop, no sets), Izzard bares her soul a little about what drives her.

“At seven years old, I saw a play, mum had died a couple of years before, and I saw a play and I thought, I really want to be on stage,” Izzard said from her Sydney hotel room overlooking the Opera House. “It was probably swapping the affection of my mother for the affection of the audience.”

That first play was one of Shakespeare’s tragedies – perhaps Macbeth but she can’t recall – and Izzard felt overwhelmed.

“I remember being intimidated by it, dyslexic with my difficulty getting words from the page through my brain and out of my mouth in a coherent way,” she said. “Elizabethan words, poetic verse, using words that you might not know because they might just be advanced English that I found rather tricky … I thought, well, Shakespeare must not be for me.”

Flash forward to 2026 and Izzard has just completed a triple-extended solo runs of Izzard – The Tragedy of Hamlet in New York, Chicago and London.

Being alone on a bare stage is how Izzard prefers to work.

“I was four years a street performer and that taught me things that are very similar to the way that Shakespeare’s actors are being taught in natural light, performing to people who could shout anything at you and interrupt you whenever they wanted,” she said.

“I’m very happy on the stage on my own and I actually even make it so that there’s nowhere I can look for the lines. I have to have the lines within me like a dream so that if I come off the script and I lose one word in the chain of this memory of all these performers – and you could lose one and it stumbles you. No one is there for me to shout a line to. If I shout a line, nothing will come back.”

Izzard compares it to tightrope walking without a net.

Her choice of performing on a blank canvas is to let Shakespeare’s words and pure storytelling take the spotlight. 

“Visceral is the word that I lean into,” she said. “I’m sure that Shakespeare wanted people to feel hatred, and anger, and joy, and sadness, and really get the emotions, and get the play, as opposed to be leaning to their neighbour and going, ‘What’s he on about?’” 

If you’re expecting to see the stand-up comedian Izzard in this play, it will only be fleeting.

“When it’s right, and the audience is right, I make the comedy zing for that five per cent of the time,” she said.

“But the drama kicks and punches hard and when Ophelia is losing it, it’s not well written. She sings a lot of songs, which do not give her the chance to really show that she is destroying herself. The way that we do it, it is emotive, it is dark and scares me sometimes.”

Shakespeare – like Izzard – was a complex character.

“Why didn’t he get his plays published?” Izzard said. “He didn’t go to university so he had a chip on his shoulder but he writes all these plays … it’s really odd. Eighteen plays were published after he died that he hadn’t bothered to put out there and you think, ‘What the hell?’”

Izzard found that the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays were “underwritten”.

“Maybe a lot of men writing for women’s roles, they didn’t quite get under the skin of that,” she said. “I found it very difficult, so we try to make them shine. I’m a trans person performing male and female roles, so I want to do honour to both.”

The purpose of Izzard’s iteration of Hamlet is to make it “accessible”.

“My definition of poetry is using the wrong words to say the right thing,” she said. “Words that you wouldn’t normally have used and you just line them up in such a way that imagery comes into your head.”

Izzard – The Tragedy of Hamlet is on at The Playhouse 31 July – 1 August. Tickets: canberratheatrecentre.com.au/show/izzard-the-tragedy-of-hamlet-2026