Naked Shakespeare with nude Jude Law
Rosalind emailed me this morning, wondering if I wanted to go to London to see Jude Law in Hamlet.
That reminded me of feature we long ago joked about adding to shakespeare.com: Naked Shakespeare with Nude Jude Law. These would be brief productions of crucial scenes from Shakespeare’s plays performed with utmost seriousness – except that at a certain point you’d see that one of the actors was totally naked. And that actor would be a nude Jude Law.
Or a reasonable, Saturday Night Live-style facsimile, if he wouldn’t agree to guest star.
Of course, this was long before the advent of YouTube and cheap video cameras, so it was more a pipe dream than anything. Now it might actually be possible.
Maybe we should jet off to London before the run is over and present the proposition to Mr. Law, amongst all the other gawkers gathered around the stage door.
We first saw Jude in some weird French play in New York, where he played Kathleen Turner’s incestuous son on whom the curtain rose while he was taking a bath, from which he rose – completely naked of course – and toweled off a little before leaving the scene. That was doubtless the origin of this idea.
Even better: a naked Kate Winslet would join him in these miniature productions. She used to like to get her kit off too.
Perhaps we could start with the “To be or not to be” – “Get thee to a nunnery” scene from Hamlet.
Now that, I’d fly to London to see.
