Shakespeare's Globe

Much like your average British spring, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is a tale of dark clouds as well as sunshine. But Lucy Bailey’s admirably clear production looks on the bright side of Shakespeare’s play, using a post-war Italian setting to drench its romances in light and warmth.In Joanna Parker’s playful design, the columns of Shakespeare’s Globe are wrapped with ivy, its boards are coated with cheery astroturf, and there's even an elaborate fountain that underscores the action with the gentle babble of water. It’s the perfect arena for the play’s famous ‘gulling’ scenes, where first Benedick (Ralph Davies) and then Beatrice (Lucy Phelps) is tricked into believing the other is in love with them. An eavesdropping Benedick scales the foliage-covered balcony as his feet barely escape the gardener’s snipping shears, while Beatrice ends up tangled in a badminton net, a sprinkler soaking her skirt. Davies and Phelps are both adept physical comedians, with chemistry that's as strong as their pratfalling skills, but the play’s chaos doesn't end with them. The masked ball becomes a woodland romp where the cast wear surreal wicker animal heads, and dinner on the lawn breaks down into a messy food fight.After all this silliness, the second act’s sickly lurch into tragedy comes as a shock. Katy Stephens makes a compelling gender-swapped Leonata, delivering an agonisingly painful rejection of her daughter Hero (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi), who's publicly shamed for her supposed infidelity. These sce

Whether it’s down to a post-pandemic budget squeeze or the desire to freshen up a formula, the Globe has changed its touring policy for 2022. Instead of one company taking a rep of three shows out on the road, this year it’s just the one: ‘Julius Caesar’, a comparatively lesser-spotted Shakespeare play on Britain’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’-heavy outdoor summer stages. A single play also means that Diane Page’s production gets a lot more attention for its between tour dates run at the Globe, with a national press night and everything. Inevitably you need to be slightly indulgent of a show built to tour: with a cast of just eight tackling innumerable roles and not much in the way of a set budget, ‘Caesar’ is a much more stripped-down affair than anything else you’ll see here this season.  Nonetheless: Page makes the most of what she has, and directs a really barrelling first half that entertains from the off, when cast member Omar Bynon – taking on the role of a sort of miscellaneous member of the hoi polloi – leads the audience in a rousing chant of ‘Pompey is a wasteman!’ (Pompey being a freshly-crushed enemy of Caesar’s). What’s most interesting about the wider casting is the gender assigned to the characters in Page’s modern-dress production: the conspirators are female-led, with pronouns explicitly changed. Anna Crichlow’s guileless Brutus and Charlotte Bate’s bookish, nervy Cassius stand in stark contrast to the blokes: Dickon Tyrrell’s self-regarding Caesar and Samuel O

‘Henry VIII’ is known as a pageantry-heavy curiosity, a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher largely written to serve as a naked bigging up of Elizabeth I’s dad. It’s better remembered by trivia fans as the play that burned down the original Globe Theatre, insofar as an unfortunate malfunction with a cannon set the roof on fire during a performance. So you can forgive the Globe for tinkering with it a little as it gets a rare outing: playwright Hannah Khalil is listed as a 'third collaborator’ for this, her update of Shakespeare’s final play, as directed by Amy Hodge. 

Although all Globe outdoor shows are equal, some are clearly more equal than others, and it’s hard not to see this production of ‘King Lear’ starring the great Kathryn Hunter in the title role as anything other than the flagship play in the 2022 season. Hunter is one of the strangest, most striking stage actors of her times, and her relative cult status has been threatened by her acclaimed turn as all three of the Weird Sisters in Joel Coen’s Denzel Washington-starring ‘Macbeth’. Her craggy wildness feels well-suited to Shakespeare’s elemental tragedy of old age, and underscoring the fact it’s a special production, she’ll be joined by Globe boss Michelle Terry, who makes her traditional showing of the season as an actor to co-star in the dual roles of the Fool and Cordelia. Veteran Anglo-Polish director Helena Kaut-Howson helms matters, with design from Pawel Dobrzycki.

Sean Holmes’s career as associate director of the Globe has thus far been fairly evenly divided between ‘light’ comedies in the main theatre, and darker, more director’s theatre-style shows in the Sam Wanamaker. As a play, ‘The Tempest’ hovers somewhere in between, also it’ll be interesting to see what Holmes does with it – the poster art suggests a relatively jolly take on Shakespeare’s tale of shenanigans on an enchanted island, although the brief season description suggests it’ll be a ‘tumultuous’ take. There’s no specific word on casting, but it’ll be performed by members of the Globe ensemble.

Staged in the indoor Sam Wanmaker Playhouse, the Globe’s first-ever summer kids’ show is written by Kerry Frampton and Ben Hales and directed by Frampton and Lucy Cuthbertson and takes the form of a sequel (of sorts) to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. It follows the continuing misadventures of the Rude Mechanicals as they attempt to write a follow up to their unexpected hit play ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. It’s aimed at ages five-to-12.

Over the years the BBC’s pre-school channel CBeebies has been steadily working through the more age-appropriate end of Shakespeare’s works in fun, condensed versions that mix light-hearted plain English paraphrasing of the Bard’s plays with the odd classic stanza or two, with the majority of roles performed by characters and presenters from across the breadth of the channel. With ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘The Tempest’ and even ‘Romeo & Juliet’ now done, next up is ‘As You Like It’ – not a play traditionally associated with young audiences, but its low bodycount and Forest of Arden-based fun and games makes it ripe adaptation. In any case, where previous outings have been filmed in the studio, this one will be recorded in situ at Shakespeare’s Globe, over the course of two days and four performances that will make it to iPlayer at a date TBC. There’s no casting, but expect major names from the CBeebies universe, while the poster would rather give away the fact that Steven Kynman will be reprising his role as William Shakespeare himself. Tickets will go on sale later than the rest of the Globe season.

This year, the Globe’s traditional end of summer season new play is a historical drama about Joan of Arc, written by actor and playwright Charlie Josephine. We don’t know a huge amount about it at this stage (beyond the fact it’s about very famous French heroine Joan d’Arc), but it seems the general vibe will be about how poor, female peasant hero Joan kicked the men on both sides of the Hundred Years War into touch, at least for a while. Ilinca Radulian will direct a cast TBC.