By the time British stand-up comedian, actor and activist Suzy Eddie Izzard logs onto Zoom from a luxury hotel at Brisbane’s South Bank, the absurdity of modern touring has already struck her.

“We could have just met for a cup of tea,” Izzard laughs. “We’re bouncing off satellites and you’re just down the road.”

That mix of surreal humour, philosophical curiosity and restless ambition has defined Izzard’s career for almost four decades. From the anarchic stand-up brilliance of Dress to Kill and Glorious to acclaimed dramatic turns in films such as Valkyrie, Ocean’s Twelve and the underseen wartime drama Six Minutes to Midnight, Izzard has built a career on refusing categories.

Recently, Izzard took on the boldest challenge yet: a one-person production of Hamlet, performing 23 characters and every major soliloquy entirely alone onstage. The show is touring Australasia with five shows at Brisbane Powerhouse, June 24 to 27. It sounds impossible. Which is precisely why Izzard wanted to do it.

“I realised I’m just following Shakespeare’s footsteps,” Izzard says. “He started in comedy and moved into dramas and tragedies and so have I.”

The Australasian tour arrives after Izzard’s acclaimed performances in New York, London and Chicago, where critics praised the production as “a Hamlet for our times”. More than 250 performances in, the show has become something larger than a theatrical experiment. It has become a statement about reinvention, endurance and artistic freedom.

“People say, ‘Why not do it with other actors?’” Izzard says. “And that would be great. But I knew I was not top of the list of Hollywood or theatre producers who would naturally say, ‘Let’s build a Hamlet around this person’. So, I thought – fine – I’ll build it myself.”

That DIY instinct runs deep. Long before fame, before sold-out arenas and Emmy nominations, Izzard was learning performance skills busking on the streets of London’s Covent Garden – only a short distance from where Shakespeare’s own actors once performed.

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“There was no fourth wall back then,” Izzard says. “The audience and actors were connected directly. So, in our production, we break that wall completely.”

It’s also part of why the one-person format works. Stripped of elaborate staging and theatrical clutter, Shakespeare’s language becomes startlingly immediate.

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“You really focus on the words,” Izzard says. “The beauty of Shakespeare. The characters. The emotional drive.”

That emotional drive has become a recurring theme in Izzard’s career. Whether discussing theatre, politics, gender identity or endurance running, they constantly return to the idea of pushing beyond perceived limitations.

“I think when we’re children we’re all creatively fearless,” Izzard says. “Then people start telling us, ‘No, you can’t do that. Stay in your lane’. I don’t believe that. We should all keep challenging ourselves.”

Few people embody that philosophy more literally than Izzard. Over the past decade she has completed an astonishing 130 marathons, including 43 marathons in 51 days around the UK and 27 marathons in 27 consecutive days across South Africa, in tribute to Nelson Mandela.

“I wasn’t an athlete,” Izzard insists. “That’s the important thing.”

The marathons, she says, weren’t really about sport. They were about stamina – physical, emotional and psychological.

“That’s the thing people don’t understand. Once you have done difficult things before, something like Hamlet doesn’t feel impossible anymore.”

That same stubborn determination helped Izzard survive the long years before success arrived. Like one of her heroes, David Bowie, Izzard spent more than a decade struggling before breaking through.

“He struggled for 11 years before he took off,” Izzard says. “And so did I. I always connected with that.”

The Bowie influence extends beyond perseverance. There is a shared instinct toward reinvention – a refusal to become trapped by past success.

“You don’t want people saying, ‘Oh, yes, 20 years ago you did something interesting’,” Izzard says. “You want to keep moving.”

That movement has taken Izzard across wildly different creative territories: stand-up comedy, Broadway, political activism, marathon running, dramatic acting and now Shakespearean tragedy.

The theatrical breakthrough came with her solo adaptation of Great Expectations, which transferred from New York to London’s West End and demonstrated that audiences were willing to follow Izzard far beyond comedy.

“Doing Great Expectations made me realise I could do Hamlet this way,” Izzard says.

The production also represents another evolution in public identity. Now performing professionally as Suzy Eddie Izzard, she describes herself as “gender fluid”, while remaining relaxed about pronouns.

“No dead names,” Izzard says cheerfully. “I’ve just added Suzy at the front. I’ve become a three-name person.”

It is all delivered with characteristic warmth and wit, but underneath lies a deeply considered philosophy about self-determination.

“It’s your life,” Izzard says. “Change the bits that aren’t working for you.”

That philosophy extends into spirituality as well. Izzard describes herself as a “spiritual atheist”, rejecting organised religion while maintaining a profound belief in humanity. “One life. Live it well,” she says.

For all the ambition surrounding Hamlet, there’s still something wonderfully punk rock about Izzard’s approach. She remains, at heart, the teenager who once broke into London’s Pinewood Studios at age 15 hoping to be randomly cast in a film.

“I marched around like I belonged there,” Izzard laughs. “I hadn’t really worked out the rest of the plan.”

Suzy Eddie Izzard’s The Tragedy of Hamlet plays Brisbane Powerhouse, June 24 to 27.

brisbanepowerhouse.org/events/eddie-izzard