Shakespeare's Globe

You can drive yourself to distraction cobbling together theories as to why, but there’s no denying that some years one of Shakespeare’s plays will get done a lot more than the others. Often it’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. But it’s not the only game in town and in 2023, the play of the moment is gory supernatural revenge tragedy ‘Macbeth’.  This Globe production is the vanguard in a slew of revivals between now and Christmas. Up next is an RSC version with gags newly sharpened by Stewart Lee; following that a version starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma that’ll tour to warehouse spaces across the country; to end the year there’ll be a Donmar take that’ll star David Tennant in the role of the ultimate murderous Scot.  I guess you don’t want to peak too soon, and in essence Abigail Graham’s Globe production seems a touch minor. There are some good - even great - ideas here. But the anticipation of all those hype-y leading men does underscore the fact that Max Bennett isn’t a very interesting Macbeth: he’s just a brittle posh guy whose mind slowly unwinds as he dutifully murders his way to the Scottish crown and beyond, at the behest of his wife and a series of portents he feels powerless to ignore. Matti Houghton‘s earthier Lady Macbeth also feels a bit tossed away, never really getting to grips with a role that can seem peripheral if the actor doesn’t really grab it by the horns.  The modern-dress nature of the production doesn’t really help: I get that a contemporary Macb

The basic point of ‘As You Like It’ as a performed play is to make Shakespeare’s rambling forest-set romance as much fun as physically possible in order to distract the audience from how meandering the story is. Sure, it’s full of great characters and speeches – including notable banger ‘all the world’s a stage’ – but it’s also basically a bunch of people fannying about in the woods for three hours. So you need to make it a laugh, and that’s exactly what director Ellen McDougall does with the final outdoor show of the Globe season, a queered-up take that skips over the sadder bits and generally sets its sights on a good time for all. Pouncing on the plot strand in which heroine Rosalind dresses up as a man in order to expedite her wooing of true love Orlando (for Reasons), McDougall’s ‘As You Like It’ is a cross-dressing extravaganza. In particular, Isabel Adomakoh Young’s ebullient, extravagantly fake-mustachioed Orlando is not so much lesbian coded as pretty much doing this drag king style. But that’s in no way suggesting her performance isn’t heartfelt. In fact the central relationship here is delightful, as the diminutive exile pursues the strapping Rosalind - performed with magnificently OTT blitheness and bluster by Canadian actor Nina Bowers, in the show’s stand-out performance.  Elsewhere there’s songs, streamers, a poem-writing contest, a wrestling match in the crowd, and a fun turn from Alex Austin as an arch Jacques who sets the mood for the production by playing o

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was broadly conceived as a venue that would play host to period-accurate Jacobean tragedies – something gestured at by the presence of a revival of ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ later this season.  This, however, feels like a sign of how far the venue has come in a decade, as leftfield director Joe Hill-Gibbins helms the first-ever Ibsen production at the Globe’s indoor theatre.  An exemplary cast led by Hattie Morahan tackles the Norwegian giant’s once scandalous classic about Helen Alving, a widow who will do anything to protect her son – including lying about the character of her late husband.

Hold on to your gingerbread lattes! This year’s outdoor Christmas show at the Globe – that is, it’s not in the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, it’s really outside – is a brand new verse adaptation of the classic fairytale ‘Hansel and Gretel’ courtesy of the great Simon Armitage. There’s no casting announced yet and we’re not entirely sure what to expect from Armitage: the basics of the story are usually pretty similar (children lost in woods, breadcrumbs, witch, sweets), but the levels of sentimentality tend to vary dramatically, though as it’s ages five-plus it presumably won’t be too dark.

There’s just one Shakespeare play in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s tenth anniversary season – which is a semi-throwback to the past as the early season at the Globe’s indoor venue didn’t feature any performances of the Bard’s works at all.  As is often the case with the Globe, we don’t know a huge amount about the production in advance, but it’s directed by Ola Ince, who gives her Shakespeare a socially conscious edge, and while some modern productions of the play are weirdly chary of making it a play about race – preferring to focus on jealousy instead – the blurb very much indicates that this won’t be the case here, indicating the production will ask ‘How do we respond to Black success? And what does it mean for accomplished Black men to be torn down by the society that initially lauded them?’.