Performances
Women were almost exclusively banned from appearing as actresses on the stage until approximately 1660 and in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, troupes appeared that were composed entirely of boy players. Indeed, they are famously mentioned in Hamlet, in which a group of travelling actors has left the city due to rivalry with a troupe of "little eyases" (unfledged hawks). Glenn Close played mother to Mel Gibson in the Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet.
Julie Christie appeared as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet. Despite her classical training as an actor, it was her first-ever venture into Shakespeare.
In Michael Almereyda's 2000 Hamlet, Ethan Hawke plays Hamlet as a film student, while Diane Venora portrays Gertrude, wife to the former and present CEOs of "Denmark Corporation".
Read more about this topic: Gertrude (Hamlet)
Famous quotes containing the word performances:
“This play holds the season’s record [for early closing], thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence it ran just five performances too many.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“At one of the later performances you asked why they called it a “miracle,”
Since nothing ever happened. That, of course, was the miracle
But you wanted to know why so much action took on so much life
And still managed to remain itself, aloof, smiling and courteous.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)