Jude Law playing Hamlet

[TrogL]

:wtf:

[Lars39]

1. He was born in London, fwiw.

[Maine-ah]

2. yummy.

[Whisp]

10. oiy. one of the few hollywood faces that

make me gasp. He is beautiful.

[mzteris]

3. i can so totally see that.

Why are you surprised?

[terrya]

4. Why not?

He's a talented actor. I'd like to see his performance.

[TrogL]

8. He's got a narrow range of roles

Hamlet is one of my favourite plays, expecially after a performance I saw at Stratford, Ontario.

The scene before the banquet was done pretty much on a bare stage. The end of the scene has a fight in it and during the fight, the lone actor with a torch dropped it, plunging the theater into darkness. The crashing and banging from the fight continued for a moment in the darkness.

When the lights came up, about 10 seconds later (yes, I know how to count seconds, I'm a musician), there was a complete banquet set up with three long tables, food, drink, chairs for about 30 people.

That's impossible. It's a thrust stage. There's no curtain. There is a trap door but it barely fits one person. I still have no idea how they did it.

Nobody played Banquo's ghost. When his lines came, a red spotlight would illuminate and there somehow was a disembodied head saying his lines and as soon as the spotlight went out, there was nobody there. No, it wasn't holograms - they weren't commercially available then.

But I was most impressed with the acting. Hamlet had a huge range of emotion.

I don't see Jude Law carrying the part.

[Shakespeare]

11. You're confusing Hamlet with Macbeth.

Banquo's in Macbeth; perhaps you meant the ghost of King Hamlet? Having him portrayed only as a voice is common enough--it allows the director to play on the possiblity that Hamlet is, indeed, mad.

[Phillycat]

5. Sexy, sexy Hamlet.

[philosophie_en_rose]

6. David Tennant is Hamlet at the RSC next year.

Jude who?

[SouthoftheBorderPaul]

7. Jude Law is an excellent actor!

[Aristus]

9. There are Shakespeare scholars who believe Hamlet should be fat.

From the line, spoken by Gertrude during the swordfight scene: "He is fat and out of breath". But they misread the line.

"Fat" was an English colloquialism meaning "tired" that lasted from the Elizabethan Era all the way up through the Victorian.