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Shakespeare's Globe

  • Theatre | Shakespeare
  • South Bank
  • Recommended
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Alex Sims
Written by Alex Sims
Contributing Writer and Editor
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Time Out says

What is it?

Built in 1599 and destroyed by fire in 1613, the original Globe Theatre was at the heart of London’s seedy entertainment district in William Shakespeare’s time. Here, productions were put on by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who included in their company old Bill himself. Although the theatre was rebuilt after the fire, it was eventually torn down in 1644, and as London’s entertainment centre moved west, this stretch of South Bank between Blackfriars and London Bridge was all but forgotten for generations.

Fast forward to 1997, when, following a decades-long campaign run by the late American actor Sam Wanamaker, the Globe was recreated near its original site. They used as much historical detail as could be found when designing the building in order to provide an authentic, Shakespearean experience with plays presented as close as possible to the kind of setting and conditions The Bard would have written for.

Compared to the seventeenth century version of the theatre, the modern day Shakespeare’s Globe only holds about half the capacity, but theatre-goers can still get a rich feel for what it was like to be a ‘groundling’ (the standing rabble at the front of the stage) in the circular, open-air theatre. The Globe Exhibition and Tour is open all year round and explores the life and work of Shakespeare and theatre in his time.

Why go?

Step into the shoes of an Elizabethan Londoner in this lovingly recreated theatre. 

Don’t miss:

A visit here isn’t just a history lesson. The theatre productions are among the best in London. Each season (spring to early autumn) includes several Shakespeare classics, performed by a company of established and upcoming actors, while works of other writers are also programmed. You can also see performances in the candlelit Jacobean indoor theatre: Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Artistically, there’s a commitment to the Bard, but within that it’s one of London’s liveliest and occasionally most controversial theatres. The current artistic director is Michelle Terry, who has focused her efforts on diversity and actor-friendliness.

When to visit:

Daily 10am–4pm. Peak times at weekends. 

Ticketing info:

Exhibition and tour £27, under 16s £20. 

Time Out tip:

If you’re heading to the theatre for the tour why not stay to watch a play when the season’s in full swing? It’s simple and easy to queue for £5 standing tickets on the day of the performance, I’ve done it many times and never missed out on bagging a place. Standing for a three-hour-long Shakespeare play may seem daunting, but the atmosphere is unbeatable and in the thick of the action, the time goes by swiftly.

Find top theatre shows in London and discover our guide to the very best things to do in London.

Details

Address
21
New Globe Walk
Bankside
London
SE1 9DT
Transport:
Tube: Blackfriars/Mansion House/London Bridge
Opening hours:
Globe Exhibition and Tour daily 10am–4pm. Closed Dec 24 and 25. (Check in advance for dates when the tour is not available.)
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What’s on

Cymbeline

Weird tragicomedy Cymbeline is one hell of a play to choose for your Shakespeare debut, and rising star director Jennifer Tang somewhat flubs it with a fussy, high-concept take that does nothing to rationalise Shakespeare’s borderline-ludicrous plot. Here, Ancient Britain is recast as a matriarchal society, with an odd, seemingly Maori-ish-but-everyone’s-wearing-trainers aesthetic, copious amounts of male-to-female gender swapping (including titular monarch Cymbeline), and every religious exclamation changed from ‘Jupiter’ to ‘Gaia’. This is not an uninteresting idea to explore, not least because there is considerable evidence that pre-Roman Britain was a matriarchal society. The trouble is that’s not the play that Shakespeare wrote, and while his writings are nothing if not malleable, it feels like Tang has imposed specificities on Cymbeline that simply don’t work with the text. The biggest problem is Nadi Kemp-Safi’s Posthumus. Here the wife – rather than husband – to Cymbeline’s daughter Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks), Posthumus gets banished by her mother-in-law and heads into exile to hang out with the all-male Romans. But it’s hard to really understand why this polite young woman agrees to a wager with Roman cad Iachimo (a deliciously smarmy Perro Niel-Mee) over whether he can bed Innogen, and furthermore it seems totally uncharacteristic for Posthumus to attempt to take out a hit on his beloved after being presented with some pretty flimsy evidence of her infidelity. ...
  • Shakespeare

Three Sisters

4 out of 5 stars
In my notes to the Globe’s first ever production of a Chekhov play I’d scrawled and underlined the word ‘BECKETTIAN!!’, thinking I was making a piercing and original observation that, yes, this take on Three Sisters had a certain Samuel Beckett vibe to it. Afterwards I looked at adaptor/translator Rory Mullarkey’s accompanying essay, and noted that he begins it with a quote from Waiting for Godot, so maybe he wasn’t intending to be as subtle as all that, but it’s nice to know you’re on the right track. Mullarkey has spoken about his discontent with contemporary English-language adaptations of Chekhov, noting they impose too much stuff on him. And while I feel Mullarkey has probably imposed stuff here too, it’s weird how his take actually feels novel, recasting the titular trio of sisters as less fading, doomed aristocrats waiting to get crushed by the Russian Revolution, and more trapped in an absurdist pantomime. Caroline Steinbeis’s production starts effectively: Michelle Terry’s Olga seems jerky and unnatural as she delivers her opening monologue, speaking at a virtual babble. Shannon Tarbet’s black-clad Masha is snarling, sardonic and talks in discombobulated non sequiturs. The piping in their old country home clanks and groans ominously. It feels like they’re automata, part of some great machine, doomed to repeat their days over and over and over. What we see, slowly, is the machine break down, as fraying interpersonal relationships and the apparent descent into...
  • Drama

Macbeth

The Globe’s outdoor season now traditionally gets underway with a low key, truncated take on a classic Shakespeare play. These ‘Playing Shakespeare’ productions are made with secondary school children in mind – thousands of tickets are given free to schools thanks to sponsor Deutsche Bank – but also open for the public. This year it’s Macbeth – always one of The Bard’s most action packed and thrilling works, the gory supernatural tragedy is sliced down to a lean 90 minutes for this revival by Lucy Cuthbertson. Remember to wrap up warm as the run begins in mid-March, waaaay before ‘real’ outdoor theatre season. 
  • Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet

Following his recent RSC hit Cowbois, Globe associate director Sean Holmes returns to the Wild West for a new take on Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy that apparently relocates the action to a world of gunslingers and desperadoes. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of fun, and perfectly suited to the Globe’s expansive outdoor theatre, while presumably at least one of the fights will be replaced by a fast draw. Young actors Abdul Sessay and Lola Shalam will star as Romeo and Juliet.
  • Shakespeare

The Crucible

This feels modestly momentous: while Arthur Miller’s classic Salem witch trials drama-slash-McCarthyism allegory is revived relatively frequently, The Crucible has never been staged at the Globe’s oudoor theatre before. That’s because nobody has been staged here except Shakespeare and specially commissioned new writing – Ola Ince’s revival of The Crucible is the first outdoor Globe revival of another playwright There is, one suspects, a subtext: new writing was intended to make the theatre more than a museum to the Bard, and to give living playwrights a chance to write for the Globe’s idiosyncratic space. But it can be a hard sell to a tourist-centric crowd and new plays have become much less frequent during the post pandemic years. This ticks the ‘non-Shakespeare’ box while likely offering a decent box office return. It’ll be intereresting to see how this all develops, but it should be noted that The Crucible feels like a tremendous fit for the Globe: set in a superstitious New England just a few decades after Shakespeare’s death, its sprawling cast and epic structure demand a huge space, and by heck the Globe is going to give it one. 
  • Drama

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Michelle Terry becomes possibly the first artistic director of literally any theatre anywhere to programme Shakespeare’s comedy curio The Merry Wives of Windsor not once but twice. Following its 2019 outing, this time it’ll be directedby Globe associate director Sean Holmes, who had a great track record with the Bard’s zanier comedies – he’s able to inject enough sardonic weirdness into them to stop then floating away. The Merry Wives is, of course, Shakespeare’s spin off from the Henry IV plays, imagining the beloved character of Falstaff now up to convoluted romantic intrigue in what would appear to be Elizabethan England. 
  • Shakespeare

Rough Magic

The new project from the team behind the Globe’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ spin-off ‘Midsummer Mechanicals’ is another play for kids loosley based on a work of Shakespeare, in this case ‘Macbeth’, catching up with the weird sisters some time after the events of the gorty tragedy. Expect an altogether more family take on the covern in this work, which is co-directed by Kerry Frampton and Ben Hales and directed by Lucy Cuthbertson. Aimed at ages five-plus, it runs in the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse throughout the summer. 
  • Children's

Twelfth Night, or What You Will

Make what you will of this, but for the biggest name Shakespeare play in the Globe’s summer 2025 season, director Robin Belfield has opted to go for the play’s rarely deployed full name. We don’t really have any as to what’s likely from this production beyond that, though the accompanying publicity image suggests an upbeat and vibrant take on the story of shipwreck and mistaken identity that is all the more glorious for its malleability – a rare play that can be as happy or sad as you like.
  • Shakespeare

Troilus and Cressida

Perhaps one reason that there is no new writing in the 2025 Globe summer season is that there was actually a Shakespeare play lined up in the ‘we know you’re unfamiliar with this play but please hear us out’ category. Not performed at this address since 2009 (bar a touring Maori production that played as part of 2012’s Globe to Globe Festival) and not seen elsewhere in London for over a decade, Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare’s extremely odd Trojan War drama that essentially combines a big chunk of the plot of the Illiad with a weirdy love story between the Trojan title characters that is basically just a subplot. RSC veteran Owen Horsley directs, in his Globe debut
  • Shakespeare
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