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Shakespeare's Globe

  • Theatre
  • South Bank
  • Recommended
  1. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (© Manuel Harlan)
    © Manuel Harlan
  2. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (© John Wildgood)
    © John Wildgood
  3. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (© John Wildgoose)
    © John Wildgoose
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Time Out says

First-class theatre in a lovingly recreated Elizabethan setting

Built in 1599 and destroyed by fire in 1613, the original Globe Theatre was at the heart of London’s seedy South London entertainment district in William Shakespeare’s time. Here, productions were put on by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who included in their company old Bill himself.

Fast forward to 1997, when, following a decades-long campaign run by the late American actor Sam Wanamaker, Shakespeare's famous wooden 'O' was recreated near its original site, using timber, thatch, and immaculately researched Elizabethan detail. You can get to grips with this theatre's history at its daytime tours, but there's a lot to be said for experiencing it in action. The venue's popular 'groundling' tickets invite punters to stand in front of the stage for under a tenner, or there's an option to get a more comfy view of the action from galleried bench seating. This outdoor space is closed in winter. But more recently, Shakespeare's Globe added the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – a candlelit indoor theatre within the Globe’s building, which presents plays in a traditional Jacobean setting.

Artistically, there’s a commitment to the Bard, but within that it’s one of London’s liveliest and occasionally most controversial theatres.

Founding artistic director Mark Rylance led from the front: one of the world’s great actors, he still returns now and again. Just don’t ask him about whether he thought Shakespeare wrote all his own plays. 

Dominic Dromgoole, the longest serving artistic director, had a reputation for being somewhat combatitive, but ushered in something of a golden age for the theatre, and oversaw the completion of the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse that allowed programming to go year round.

Emma Rice brought two scintillatingly good seasons of work to the Globe before she was forced out by the theatre's board, who were annoyed at her propensity for using amplified light and sound in productions. They wanted to restrict her; she walked.

The current artistic director is Michelle Terry. An actor-manager in the Rylance mould, she has focussed her efforts on diversity and actor-friendliness, and has already had her first hit with new feminist play 'Emilia', a story of Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady' which landed a West End transfer. 

Written by
Time Out editors

Details

Address:
21
New Globe Walk
Bankside
London
SE1 9DT
Transport:
Tube: Blackfriars/Mansion House/London Bridge
Price:
Exhibition and tour from £25, under 18s from £18
Opening hours:
Globe Exhibition and Tour daily 10am–4pm. Closed Dec 24 and 25. (Check in advance for dates when the tour is not available.)
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What’s on

Othello

  • Shakespeare

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. It injects a note of campy, thrillery fun into what tends to be a rather dour play. And the Met’s dismal record on race feels like the perfect way to dig into the themes of the tragedy.  For half an hour or so it zips by: there’s a neat montage scene at the start in which we’re quickly introduced to Ken Nwosu’s Othello and Poppy Gilbert as his wife, Desdemona. I wasn’t entirely sure about the heavy modification of Shakespeare’s dialogue to add in contemporary policing references – ‘intel’ this and ‘guvnor’ that seemed to be trying too hard when it was never going to fully fit anyway – but there’s something deliciously ballsy about the attempt. Unfortunately, it soon gets hopelessly tangled up in itself, in large part because Ince throws a second elaborate conceit into the mix: Othello’s subconscious is a character, played by Ira Mandela Siobhan. He paces, twitches and spins around – an indication of the outwardly calm Othello’s interior anguish, as his treacherous BFF Iago (Ralph Davis) slowly poisons him against Desdemona.  I’m not saying this is a terrible idea per se. But in the context of a production already preoccupied with homaging cop dramas? It’s a terrible idea. The two big concepts keep tripping over each other: certainly neither makes the other any clearer, and the police stuff gradually falls by the w

The Duchess of Malfi

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Drama

Francesca Mills is luminous in the title role of this sadistic thriller by Shakespeare’s young contemporary, John Webster. It’s thrilling to see this exceptional actress in something more challenging than comic and minor bits; good also that director Rachel Bagshaw does not try to weave Mills’s dwarfism into the production but lets her talent shine. Mills speaks blank verse immaculately and emotionally, her voice often shimmering on the edge of laughter or tears. Directors should be queueing up to cast her in a big Shakespearean role where she can really spread her wings. Webster’s plays are more lurid and less subtle than Shakespeare’s. Boil down the plots and they sound like something Joey Tribbiani would star in: in this one, the Duchess’s evil twin torments and destroys her and her babies because he is so jealous of her secret marriage. It's driven by transgressive, incestuous desires and deals in plotting, sneaky sex and snooping; what's done in the shadows. Intimate, lit only by candles or, for one nightmarish central scene, plunged into darkness – ‘Malfi’ was designed for a theatre exactly like the Sam Wanamaker. Indeed, the Globe’s indoor playhouse first opened its doors with a production ten years ago.  he hefty 17-strong production team includes two Intimacy Directors and a Candle Consultant, so I was expecting something quite spicy. The candles were genuinely exciting, casting a mottled, trembling light over the inevitable descent to torture, madness and murder. B

Romeo and Juliet

  • Shakespeare

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.  This year it’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that gets the 90-minute treatment, directed by the Globe’s director of education Lucy Cuthbertson, in a production that relocates the tale of the feuding Montagues and Capulets to contemporary gang culture.

Much Ado About Nothing

  • Shakespeare

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’. 

Richard III

  • Shakespeare

‘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. Although Terry has stressed that she will not be playing Richard as disabled – but rather, a narcissist – the production has had a frosty reception so far, with many critics citing the RSC’s 2022 production – which starred Arthur Hughes, an actor with scoliosis – as a watershed moment. Exactly what will happens remains to be seen: it could be a storm in a teacup, especially as the complaints seem largely social media driven and there seems to be a certain lack of clarity over the fact Terry won’t be ‘cripping up’. Nonetheless, even if she carries it off successfully, the role has undeniably tended to go to able-bodied actors performing with a limp, which feels dicey in 2024 – a lot of people will be watching to see how this production is received. 

The Taming of the Shrew

  • Shakespeare

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’. Despite – or perhaps because of – the almost undeniable misogyny in the way Petruchio sets about ‘taming’ the truculent Katherine, the play remains impressively popular as a creative challenge to directors, who tend to find inventive ways to either mitigate its misogyny or use it to make audiences feel uncomfortable. There’s not much of a clue as to the aesthetic, though the words ‘absurd carnival’ are bandied around in the official description. 

Antony and Cleopatra

  • Shakespeare

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. The deaf actor has been a regular on the Globe’s stage in recent years, and in 2024 she’ll take on the role of Egyptian queen Cleopatra in Blanche McIntyre’s bilingual English/BSL production of Shakespeare’s great Roman tragedy. 

The Comedy of Errors

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Shakespeare

This review is from 2023. ‘The Comedy of Errors’ return for 2024. ‘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. But where ‘Twelfth Night’ is melancholic and profound, ‘The Comedy’ is so fundamentally lacking in emotional weight that modern directors have a tendency to really overwork the physical business when staging it, worried that the language isn’t enough to secure the laughs required to justify the endeavour. Sean Holmes’s deft Globe production steers an almost effortless path through it, however. It’s less conceptual than some of his shows at the iconic theatre, though there does seem to be a whole thing going on with the cast wearing wilfully old-school Elizabethan-style costumes - there are a lot of codpieces in the house.  Mostly, though, he just makes it fun. Breezing in at an hour and 45 minutes with no interval, it’s an uncluttered production that avoids gimmickry. When the National Theatre did it about ten years ago the production featured a live ambulance on stage for whatever reason. This one puts storytelling at the centre: with a lack of extraneous physical business, it’s about as easy as is ever going to be to follow the plot about two sets of identical twin brothers, with the same names as each other, who are separated as children and grow up in different, rival city-states, now causing merry heck as they end up 

Princess Essex

  • Drama

The first new play proper to run outdoors at the Globe since ‘I, Joan’, actor Anne Odeke’s play tells the extraordinary story of Princess Dinubolu, the first woman of colour to enter a beauty pageant in the UK: way back in 1908, Southend-on-Sea. Almost certainly not a princess, the mysterious woman was initially barred from the contest, but insisted upon entering – and succeeded after no rules were found stopping her. Odeke stars, in a production directed by Robin Belfield. 

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