Michelle Terry Shakespeare's Globe

Mark Rylance to feature in Michelle Terry's inaugural Shakespeare’s Globe season

Will Longman
Will Longman

The new artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Michelle Terry has announced her first season at the helm of the theatre.

Terry takes over from previous AD Emma Rice, who announced she would be leaving the theatre in October 2016. She has announced she will introduce a new Globe ensemble, which will feature Terry and perform in a number of productions throughout the season, such as Hamlet and As You Like It.

Mark Rylance will return to the Globe in July to play Iago in Othello, opposite André Holland in the title role. The production, which will run from 20th July to 13th October, will be directed by Rylance's wife Claire van Kampen. Rylance was the first artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe when it opened in 1995, and held the post for ten years.

Blanche McIntyre will direct The Winter's Tale from 22nd June. Macintyre's previous credits include work for the Donmar Warehouse and the RSC, and she has directed The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It at the Globe before. She said returning to the Globe "feels like coming home". The play runs until 14th October.

Barrie Rutter will direct a production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which will preview from 25th May and run until 30th June. Rutter said: "The invitation to direct a play with so little stage history comes with great dollops of intrigue, relish and excitement." It will be Rutter's first production since he left Northern Broadsides last July.

Brendan O'Shea will tour productions of The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, allowing the audience to decide which production will play on the night. It was traditional in Shakespeare's time for companies to tour with a repertoire of several productions, with the most powerful member of the household deciding which play was performed. The tour begins at the Globe from 7th May.

The season will open with productions of Hamlet and As You Like It, which will run alongside each other from April performed by the newly announced Globe Ensemble. Terry said: "Both written around 1599, the year the original Globe was built, these plays speak to each other in surprising and exciting ways. An ensemble of artists will explore these well-thumbed and popular plays in parallel, as if for the first time, and will put the story and the storyteller at the heart of this exploration". Hamlet will run from 25th April to 26th August, with As You Like It running from 2nd May.

A new play by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Emilia, will run at the Globe from 10th August to 1st September. The play is about Emilia Bassano, who it is thought was Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady of the Sonnets'. The play 'explores Emilia in her own right as poet, mother and feminist'.

Matt Hartley's new play Eyam, which is about a town in Derbyshire when the plague arrives in 1665, will run at the Globe from 15th September to 13th October directed by Adele Thomas.

Nick Bagnall will also direct a production of Love's Labour's Lost in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from 23rd August to 15th September. 

Terry is primarily known as an Olivier Award-winning actress and writer who has appeared on the Globe's stage in As You Like It (2015), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2013) and Love's Labour's Lost (2007). In 2016, she played Henry V at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, and it was announced she would take over from Rice in July of last year.

Tickets for the new season at the Globe will go on sale to the public on 29th January 2018 at 10am.

Originally published on

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