Shakespeare's Globe

It’s been a bit of a choppy season over at the good ship Globe this summer. But the iconic theatre’s associate artistic director Sean Holmes was brought in a few years back to steady the boat, and that’s precisely what he does here.  He, his creative team and the in-house Globe Ensemble of actors are like kids in a sweet shop with this amusing, visually inventive, above all fun take on Shakespeare’s final play. It begins with Rachel Hannah Clarke’s Ariel archly hosing down the front rows of the audience – that’s your tempest for the night – and keeps up the pace from there. Here, exiled magician Prospero’s enchanted island is a sort of gone-to-seed holiday resort, strewn with washed-up oceanic junk. It’s presided over by Ferdy Roberts’s sorcerer, who unselfconsciously swans about the isle in nothing more than a pair of aggressively unflattering yellow budgie smugglers. Petty and powerful, Prospero casually uses his magic to manipulate everyone around him – even his beloved daughter Miranda (Nadi Kemp-Safyi). He gives Clarke’s Ariel - who switches between a series of delightfully kitsch, spangly costumes - a weaselly politician's answer every time she asks her about her long-promised freedom. By contrast, Ciarán O’Brien’s Caliban is a diminutive guy in a pool boy outfit with a big badge marked ‘staff’: yes, he harbours some pretty psychotic feelings towards Prospero, but Prospero has taken over his island, enslaved him and treated him like shit. So yup, Holmes’s production is

Let’s be honest: it’s a red flag when the most famous English writer of all time has a play about one of the most obsessed-over eras of English history and it almost never actually gets staged. Covering vaguely the same period of time as Hilary Mantel’s much better ‘Wolf Hall’, ‘Henry VIII’ by Shakespeare plus collaborator John Fletcher packs in such greatest historical hits as the rise and fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, his wooing of Anne Boleyn (here ‘Anne Bullen’) and his schism from the Catholic Church.  The problem is that when it was written, these events were still recent history. ‘Henry VIII’ is a propaganda play of sorts, offering a whitewashed account of some of the more tumultuous events in the life of the dad of the (relatively) recently deceased Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare actually wrote some great propaganda plays. But this is not one of them: it lacks the camp malevolence of ‘Richard III’, or the devastating human insight of ‘Richard II’. Productions of ‘Henry VIII’ have traditionally leant upon dazzling spectacle over psychological depth, and indeed the play’s biggest claim to fame is that a malfunctioning cannon special effect in a 1613 production burnt down the original Globe. It’s reasonable, then, that director Amy Hodge and playwright Hannah Khalil have opted for a wilfully revisionist revival. Hodge all but directs it as a comedy, with Adam Gillen’s Henry a petulant, childlike oddball who in one retina-searingly memor

The Globe’s first ever bona fide kids’ show is basically a riff on Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Set one year later, it follows following light relief yokels the ‘rude mechanicals’ as they reconvene on the anniversary of the sole performance of their disastrous play ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thysbe’ to mount a follow-up. The first half of Lucy Cuthbertson and Kerry Frampton’s production - written by Frampton and Ben Hales – consists of our four bumbling heroes Nick Bottom (Kerry Frampton), Peter Quince (Jamal Franklin), Francis Flute (Sam Glen) and Patience Snout (Melody Brown)  trying to get the old band back together, only to discover that’s not going to happen. Formerly charged with playing all the female roles, Flute now has a beard and a broken voice; their old mucker Tom Snout has been jailed so has instead sent along his wife Patience (who as a woman isn’t legally allowed to act); Quince is a brittle, nervous mess; and Frampton’s serenely self-believing Bottom has blithely alienated the rest of the old crew but believes it’ll turn out just fine with just the four of them. Chaos ensues, and then even more chaos ensues in the second half when they actually stage their new play, which is essentially a shambolic retelling of the events of Shakespeare’s play.  There’s lots of funny stuff here, most notably the actors themselves, who have an easy, amusing repartee with the audience, and handle various shouted interventions f

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

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

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 the actual plot at this stage, but it seems the general vibe will be about how poor peasant hero Joan kicked the men on both sides of the Hundred Years War into touch, at least for a while. It’ll also offer an exploration of Joan’s gender identity, with Joan here explicitly depicted as non-binary, with the role played by non-binary actor Isobel Thom. Ilinca Radulian will direct.

Wrap up warm! The sole outdoor show in the Globe’s winter season – ie it’s happening in the main theatre, while the others are in the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – is Hannah Khalil’s ‘The Fir Tree’, the Irish-Palestinian playwright’s stage adaptation of Han Christian Andersen’s fairytale, which tells the story of a family’s Christmas from the perspective of their Christmas tree.