The Stage

Shakespeare’s Globe announces new season

Published Thursday 12 February 2009 at 18:30 by Lalayn Baluch

Penny Downie and Ellie Kendrick are to appear in Shakespeare Globe Theatre’s 2009 season, entitled Young Hearts.

Downie - who played alongside David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet - will star in Frank McGuiness’ version of Euripides’ Helen, which will be directed by Deborah Bruce.

Meanwhile, 18-year-old Kendrick - who most recently starred in BBC1’s The Diary of Anne Frank - will take the lead in Romeo and Juliet alongside Adetomiwa Edun. The production, which will launch the season, will also star New Zealand actor Rawiri Paratene, who will play Friar Lawrence.

Other highlights include As You Like It, directed by Thea Sharrock, the return of Che Walker’s Frontline and 2007 show Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the Globe’s first production of Troilus and Cressida

The season will also feature a new play entitled A New World - A Life of Thomas Paine, by Trevor Griffiths. The show, which was originally a screenplay commissioned by Richard Attenborough and last year played on the radio, tells the life story of British revolutionary Thomas Paine, who was instrumental in the American and French revolutions.

Launching the season, Shakespeare’s Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole said: “The title of the season is Young Hearts - a way of celebrating the youth and incredible excitement of this space, which is still only 12 years old.

“It has rejuvenated the whole theatre scene - it has had a massive effect on theatre culture. Michael Boyd said that the RSC has come to discover that Shakespeare did not write plays for the proscenium arch, for people sitting in one room, looking at people sitting in another room. If any place has afforded that insight, it is the Globe.”