Shakespeare plays in London

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’. 

Super-director Jamie Lloyd is renowned for his powers of celebrity wrangling. But even by his standards this is quite the coup: his production of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ will star Tom Holland, aka Spider-Man himself.

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).

‘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…

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’. 

‘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.

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. 

To honour the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death, we asked you to rank all of his plays in order of greatness. Here's how the top ten turned out in the ultimate Shakespeare play-off

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