Globe adds two more plays to its season

Published Tuesday 27 November 2007 at 12:30 by Matthew Hemley

Shakespeare’s Globe is to increase its next season by two productions following a successful 2007 in which it made more than £5 million from ticket sales.

The theatre’s 2008 season will be made up of nine productions, up from this year’s seven, and will include Shakespeare’s King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Timon of Athens plus two new commissions.

Che Walker has written The Frontline, a play set on a Saturday night outside Camden tube station, and poet Glyn Maxwell, has written Liberty, an adaptation of Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif.

In addition to its six main stage productions, the Globe will expand its regional touring in 2008, with productions of Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale.

Meanwhile, Footsbarn Theatre, who have not performed in the UK for 15 years, will stage a world premiere of A Shakespeare Party, which has been specially conceived for the Globe’s performance space.

The addition of two productions to the Globe’s 2008 line-up follows a record breaking 2007 season, which saw it take more than £5 million in ticket sales, a rise of £520,000 on 2006’s figures.

Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who will direct King Lear, said next year’s season had been named Totus mundus agit histrionem, meaning The Whole World is a Playhouse, which was thought to have been the original Globe’s moto.

He said: “Following the achievements of our most successful box office season ever, we are delighted to be presenting such a range of Shakespeare’s plays in 2008, proving the glorious unruly diversity of his genius. We are complementing these works with two big and bold new plays, which transform the reconstructed Globe into a platform for contemporary writers.”

Public booking for the season opens on February 11, 2008.