The Stage

Shakespeare’s Globe to be heart of original writing again - Dromgoole

Published Tuesday 17 January 2006 at 14:25 by Nuala Calvi

Dominic Dromgoole has pledged to return Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to the hub of new writing that it was in the 17th century, as he announced his plans as the venue’s new artistic director.

His inaugural season will include two world premieres - Under the Black Flag by Simon Bent and In Extremis: The Story of Abelard and Heloise by Howard Brenton - which will run alongside four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays.

Dromgoole, who replaces former artistic director Mark Rylance, said in future years half the Globe’s programme would consist of new work. “It’s a risk but it’s a necessary risk, to keep this place rejuvenated and alive,” he explained.

“Mark pushed very hard that this is an actors’ theatre, which is right, but we’re also in the greatest writers’ theatre of all time, bar none. I’m very keen that writers become part of the blood stream again, and rub up against Shakespeare directly. So I’ve started a commissioning fund for 2007/8 and we’re talking to a lot of writers who are very excited about working with us.”

Dromgoole said he was looking for work with a “broad sweep, a sense of history, momentum and public energy”. Jack Shepherd has already been commissioned to write a new play for the venue and managers are in talks with Debbie Tucker Green. The Globe will also aim to recruit more high-profile performers in future and is in negotiations with three big names about parts in upcoming productions.

Meanwhile, Dromgoole will direct Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra for the 2006 season, while Lucy Bailey and Chris Luscombe will stage Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors respectively.

Dromgoole said the choices would have particular political resonance for modern audiences but ruled out any updating of the works. “You won’t be seeing any flak jackets or jeeps. That insults the audience’s intelligence,” he added. “They are perfectly capable of making those connections.”

He will also steer clear of the “original practices” approach of putting on plays exactly as they would have been done in Elizabethan times. “Original practices was something Mark did and it would be very dishonest for me to go, ‘Oh I like that, I’m going to steal it’, but we are going to follow some of those disciplines,” he said. “We will be working with Elizabethan costumes, Elizabethan music and some Elizabethan stage practice but we’ll be jazzy with them in a way original practices wasn’t.”

The Globe opened in 1996 and is based on the wooden “O” design of the original open-air playhouse where Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote many of his best-known plays. Rylance ran the Southwark venue for ten years before Dromgoole was recruited from the Oxford Stage Company.