<P> In 1933, the play was revived by actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic and was taken on a seven - month nationwide tour throughout the United States . It starred Orson Welles, Brian Aherne and Basil Rathbone . The production was a modest success, and so upon the return to New York, Cornell and McClintic revised it and for the first time, the play was presented with almost all the scenes intact, including the Prologue . The new production opened on Broadway in December 1934 . Critics wrote that Cornell was "the finest Juliet of her time", "endlessly haunting", and "the most lovely and enchanting Juliet our present - day theatre has seen". </P> <P> John Gielgud's New Theatre production in 1935 featured Gielgud and Laurence Olivier as Romeo and Mercutio, exchanging roles six weeks into the run, with Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet . Gielgud used a scholarly combination of Q1 and Q2 texts and organised the set and costumes to match as closely as possible to the Elizabethan period . His efforts were a huge success at the box office, and set the stage for increased historical realism in later productions . Olivier later compared his performance and Gielgud's: "John, all spiritual, all spirituality, all beauty, all abstract things; and myself as all earth, blood, humanity...I've always felt that John missed the lower half and that made me go for the other...But whatever it was, when I was playing Romeo I was carrying a torch, I was trying to sell realism in Shakespeare ." </P> <P> Peter Brook's 1947 version was the beginning of a different style of Romeo and Juliet performances . Brook was less concerned with realism, and more concerned with translating the play into a form that could communicate with the modern world . He argued, "A production is only correct at the moment of its correctness, and only good at the moment of its success ." Brook excluded the final reconciliation of the families from his performance text . </P> <P> Throughout the century, audiences, influenced by the cinema, became less willing to accept actors distinctly older than the teenage characters they were playing . A significant example of more youthful casting was in Franco Zeffirelli's Old Vic production in 1960, with John Stride and Judi Dench, which would serve as the basis for his 1968 film . Zeffirelli borrowed from Brook's ideas, altogether removing around a third of the play's text to make it more accessible . In an interview with The Times, he stated that the play's "twin themes of love and the total breakdown of understanding between two generations" had contemporary relevance . </P>

What era does romeo and juliet take place