Sitting In The Cheap Seats

Shakespeare’s Globe is delighted to announce the summer season 2020 will include Shakespeare’s  Romeo & Juliet ,  Much Ado About Nothing ,  Twelfth Night ,  Antony & Cleopatra , a two-day event ‘ Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and Climate Emergency’ , a symposium  ‘Shakespeare and Race’ , a Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production of  Macbeth  with 20,000 free tickets to school children, the return of  family festival ‘Telling Tales’ , and a new dramatisation of  Ovid’s  Metamorphoses  by our resident writers .

Shakespeare’s Globe is delighted to announce full casting for the next two productions opening in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in February:  The Taming of the Shrew , directed by  Maria Gaitanidi , and Thomas Middleton’s  Women Beware Women , directed by  Amy Hodge .

Shakespeare’s Globe is delighted to announce the Summer Season 2019. Celebrating and interrogating our ‘sceptred isle’ through Shakespeare’s history plays, a year-long journey begins with Richard II, opening 22 February in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse , continuing into the Globe Theatre this summer with Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. The season also includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, and the return of 2018’s As You Like It. Robin Hood tales will form the core of the Read Not Dead series this year, and festivals throughout the summer include Women & Power and Poland is Hamlet. This year’s Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production will be Romeo and Juliet, opening on 28 February, with 20,000 free tickets available to state secondary schools. The Shakespeare’s Globe Touring Ensemble will once again present a trio of plays for the audience to choose from: The Comedy of Errors, Pericles, and Twelfth Night.

It’s somehow fitting that the last Shakespeare of Emma Rice ’s final (summer) season is King Lear. A play that shows us how the established world can change based on one rash decision will certainly have some resonance at a venue who made the decision to terminate Rice’s employment as Artistic Director so early on.

As You Like It  is one of Shakespeare’s most divisive plays, critics and audiences seem to either love or hate it with little middle ground. It seems to be a favourite of  Shakespeare’s Globe  too, this being their third production in the last six years.