Suzy Eddie Izzard at at Odeon Luxe, Leicester Square, on Oct. 11, 2023. Credit: B. Lenoir / Shutterstock
If you were going to pick a Shakespeare play to adapt into a solo work, you probably wouldn’t pick “Hamlet.” The bard’s longest work is known through the centuries for its psychological complexity and its interweaving subplots.
And if you were going to pick a type of actor to take on the task of performing that show, your first pick might not be someone who’s best known for comedy, and who delights in casual gender-fluidity.
But if you’re familiar with Suzy Eddie Izzard, you’re probably unsurprised, and pretty jazzed, that she’ll perform “The Tragedy of Hamlet” five times inside Jaeb Theatre at Tampa’s David A. Straz Center of the Performing Arts this weekend.
Izzard allows that she’s most widely considered a comic actor or even a comedian—her last appearance at the Straz was an evening-length stand-up performance to a packed and appreciative theater a couple of years back—but drama has always been a focus of her career.
“A lot of people know me from comedy,” Izzard said. “But if you watch ‘The Riches,’ that was a drama. ‘A Day in the Life of Joe Egg,’ when I was Tony-nominated for best actor along with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Stanley Tucci, that was drama. ‘Valkyrie,’ that was drama. Nearly all the films and television that you might have seen me in, they have been dramas. But I’m maybe less known for them because none of them quite broke out the way I wanted them to.”
So, despite that reputation, and despite the tendency people might have to think that a one-person “Hamlet” is some kind of parody, Izzard stresses that what she’s performing is real Shakespeare.
“It’s ‘Hamlet,’” she said. “It’s ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet,’ as we say on the poster.”
Izzard, as fans know but others say not, first came to prominence as Eddie Izzard. Over the course of her career she started dressing primarily in women’s clothing and wearing eye makeup, then asking to be referred to as Suzy. She’s not a female impersonator or a drag queen. She just likes wearing dresses. When she did her stand-up show at the Straz she was tastefully attired tastefully in a short skirt and high heels; during her Zoom interview with Creative Loafing Tampa Bay she wore traditional woman’s make-up and beads.
She prefers to be called “Suzy Eddie Izzard,” and prefers to be referenced as “she,” but she doesn’t make a big deal about it.
Anyway, back to “Hamlet.”
Izzard was drawn to performing very early in her life. Her mother died when Izzard was five years old. When she saw a play and witnessed the praise that actors could garner from audiences, she knew almost immediately that he wanted theater to be his life.
“I thought, ‘My god, some is getting this great reaction on the stage. I want to do this acting. I want to be an actor’” she said. “I think it was a substitute for love and mum’s affection. I think it’s a very healthy way of dealing with the loss of one’s mother.”
There was a problem, though: Izzard was dyslexic, so preparing for auditions was difficult at best.
Somewhere in her 20s she discovered her talent for comedy and realized he could create and perform her own work.
But a longing to perform drama, and Shakespeare in particular, never ebbed. She had established herself as a comedian, then decided to find a way to pursue dramatic roles.
“After a while I decided, ‘I really want to do Shakespeare now, because I’m ready’,” she said. “‘I want to test myself and push myself and get to the limits of what one can do as an actor.’”
But dramatic roles aren’t easy to come by when you have a reputation as a comedian.
“No one would really throw roles at me,” she said. “Nothing was coming my way.”
Her stand-up comedy often involved multiple characters, so Izzard figured she could do the same with drama.
Her brother, Mark Izzard, adapted “Great Expectations’ into a one-person show, which Suzy Eddie performed in New York and London. Audiences loved it, so Izzard thought maybe “Hamlet” could work in the same format.
“That was quite a radical idea, but a lot of people are doing solo performances around the world now,” she said.
But Izzard’s dyslexic brain still told her that she might not be able to handle Shakespeare. When she tried to read Shakespeare in school, the elevated and sometimes archaic language had been an obstacle. It was still intimidating to her as an adult.
“I realized by watching Polanski’s “Macbeth’ that that was an action movie,” she said. “There are stories in that, visceral stories with characters. Don’t get so caught up with the Elizabethan. For me, I wanted the guts, that visceral story of Hamlet. That’s what I was pushing for.”
Izzard plays 22 different characters in her solo version, which was also adapted by brother Mark. She’s everyone from Hamlet and Ophelia to both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Suzy Eddie Izzard in ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet’ Credit: Carol Rosegg / Straz Center
It sounds as though it could be exhausting for both audiences and for Izzard, who often performs the show twice in a single day. In fact, at least one critic, in an otherwise positive review, has used the word “exhausting” to describe the audience experience, fatigue isn’t much of an issue for Izzard.
Besides her performances and nontraditional wardrobe, Izzard is known as a marathon runner. She famously runs dozens of marathons in a matter of weeks to raise money for various charities, often doing shows later that same evening.
“First of all it was 43 in 51 days, that was around the United Kingdom, then I did 27 in 27 days in South Africa as a salute to Nelson Mandela, and then I did 29 in 29 days through the cities of Europe,” she said. “And then I did 32 in 31 days on a treadmill during COVID. That was tough.”
The numbers for “The Tragedy of Hamlet” are quite as awe-inspiring, but they’re impressive.
“We’ve now done over 220 performances and we’ve sold 65,000 tickets,” Izzard said. “So we’re in a good place.”
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This article appears in Mar. 05 – 11, 2026.
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