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King Lear, Almeida, 2024
Photo: Marc BrennerDanny Sapani and Clarke Peters

Shakespeare plays in London

Comedies, tragedies and histories – catch them all in the Bard's spiritual home

Andrzej Lukowski
Written by
Andrzej Lukowski
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Whether you’re planning a trip to the iconic Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, catching a production for the Royal Shakespeare Company or seeing a spot of Shakespearean drama elsewhere in London, here’s where to watch the biggest and best plays by the Bard in London.

Shakespeare plays in London this month

  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Islington

As we found out to our cost last year, when Kenneth Branagh tried to bosh out a two-hour version, ‘King Lear’ is a play that resists being cut…

  • 3 out of 5 stars
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  • Canada Water

As evidenced by his recent fretting about content warnings in theatre, Ralph Fiennes is an old-fashioned type of actor. And that cuts a couple of ways in terms of his performance as Shakespeare’s blood-drenched Scottish monarch…

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  • Theatre
  • Shakespeare
  • Kingston

There have been at least four major UK production of The Scottish Play in the last six months or so, and here’s something related, but different: Zinnie Harris’s ‘Macbeth (An Undoing)’ reimagines the story from Lady Macbeth’s perspective and asks what Shakespeare’s version of the story may have left out. 

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  • Theatre
  • Shakespeare
  • South Bank

Reframing ‘Othello’ as a police procedural in which Shakespeare’s Moorish general is a high-ranking officer at the Met is an inspired notion from director Ola Ince.

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  • South Bank

As is now traditional at Shakespeare’s Globe, its outdoor programming gets underway with a truncated pre-season Shakespeare play aimed at schoolkids, but very much open to members of the public up for open-air theatre in March. 

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  • Theatre
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  • Wimbledon

Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy is having a busy spring, with one kids’ version at the Globe, the full-blown Tom Holland version in the West End, and this, a children’s version from Beats & Elements – aka Conrad Murray and Lakeisha Lynch-Stevens of the BAC Beatbox Academy – who’ll retell the story of the starcross’d lovers in a short version based on ‘rap, rhymes and beautiful harmonies’. For ages nine to 12-plus. 

Shakespeare plays coming soon

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  • Shakespeare
  • Covent Garden

Unstoppable acting legend Ian McKellen and revered director Robert Icke join forces for this incredibly exciting new show, Icke’s own adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’ Parts 1 and 2 starring 84-year-old Sir Ian in the great role of dissolute knight John Falstaff. 

  • Theatre
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  • South Bank

The Globe’s 2024 season proper kicks off with one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, as the theatre's in-house director Sean Holmes helms ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. Ekow Quartey and Amalia Vitale star as tempestuous lovers Beatrice and Benedick in an Elizabethan dress production of the play that we’re promised will turn the Globe into a ‘luxurious paradise’. 

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  • Theatre
  • Shakespeare
  • Regent’s Park

We know very little about the OAT’s production of Shakespeare’s beloved ‘serious comedy’, but it’ll be directed by RSC veteran Owen Horsley, and the blurb suggests it'll be drenching the story of Viola’s shipwrecked arrival in Illyria in some serious Mediterranean summer vibes (and thus technically relocating Illyria a few hundred miles south west).

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  • Theatre
  • Shakespeare
  • South Bank

‘Richard III’ is a commonly staged play: the Globe last did it in 2019, and the last major London production before this one was Adjoa Andoh’s, which came to Richmond in 2023. However, this production from Elle While has already sparked considerable backlash for the casting of Globe boss Michelle Terry in the role of the villainous monarch, on the grounds that she’s an able-bodied actor and the character as written is disabled…

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  • South Bank

Having directed a couple of shows in the Sam Wanamaker, hip director Jude Christian makes the leap to the main Globe theatre for the first time as she tackles a typically thorny play; Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’. 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Shakespeare
  • South Bank

‘The Comedy of Errors’ can sometimes feel like a less successful dry run for the more grown-up ‘Twelfth Night’, both being twin sibling-based mistaken identity comedies set in coastal cities.

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  • Shakespeare
  • South Bank

The unexpected furor over Michelle Terry playing Richard III has somewhat overshadowed the fact that Shakespeare’s Globe has a disabled lead for one of its big productions this summer, in the form of Nadia Nadarajah. 

Your vote: The top ten Shakespeare plays

A guide to Shakespeare's Globe

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