Sean Holmes News

Shakespeare's Globe has announced a series of new events running alongside the season of Shakespeare plays in the indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

These include: a panel discussion with Maxine Peake, Artistic Director Michelle Terry and Co-Director of Education Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, dubbed 'Hamlet and She' as part of a 'Women and Power' festival; the hit feminist comedy podcast, The Guilty Feminist, returns for another live recording in the Playhouse hosted by Deborah Frances-White; and more!

This Autumn, be part of a live theatrical treasure hunt with Percy the Park Keeper as you help him get his animal friends ready for winter.  Forest school meets puppetry, world-class theatrical storytelling and clue-based adventure in this unique, non-stop 60-minute experience, designed especially for Chiswick House and Gardens.

Ambitious and never less than interesting, the 90 minutes all-through running time turns already gruesome material into a tougher watch that it need be.

Shakespeare's Globe has announced the Education Activities available to young people and their families this October Half-Term. Public booking opens on Thursday 16 September at 10.00am. Tickets for friends and Patrons are currently available.

The season will feature Shakespeare's Measure for Measure directed by Blanche McIntyre, Hamlet directed by Sean Holmes, The Merchant of Venice directed by Abigail Graham, and a festive reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's The Fir Tree written by Hannah Khalil. Alongside productions in the Playhouse, there will also be two week-long festivals (including the return of Shakespeare and Race) and half-term events for families.

The Globe’s Artistic Director Michelle Terry has not had the easiest start to her tenure. Until a few weeks ago, she had not put on a live show since last March. Happily, with the summer season now in full swing and Groundling tickets returned, she now stars in the theatre’s joyful new production of Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare’s comedy of mistaken identity, music and the madness of love, Twelfth Night, finds new life in the Globe Theatre for the Summer 2021 season.

Go inside rehearsals of Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe. Directed by Associate Artistic Director of the Globe, Sean Holmes, this production see’s the return of the cast from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in addition to Artistic Director of the Globe Michelle Terry who will be playing Viola.

And they're off! London theatres have been open for several weeks now, and the reviews once again are coming hard and fast as a glance at this very site will confirm. Quick off the mark have been the smaller-sized shows: solo plays like Cruise or Harm or a three-person West End entry like Amy Berryman's Walden (though that title was beset by pre-opening dramas of its own, more of which below). But as the big musicals prepare their own re-emergence on to a scene marked out already by the producer Sonia Friedman's RE:EMERGE season (of which Walden is the first of three to open), excitement is in the air. The question now remains as to who, precisely, the audience is likely to be for these shows, given the difficulty for many in travelling to the UK.

One of London’s most venerated theatres, Shakespeare's Globe has re-opened its doors with Sean Holmes’s gaudy 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With staggered entrance slots and social distance protocols in place, the Globe itself feels it too. The groundlings are masked now (as is the audience as a whole) and are seated on scattered chairs while the actors wear face coverings when they walk among them.

HOME, Manchester's largest multi-arts venue, are launching a massive temporary outdoor arts space this Summer. The new space, named Homeground will be located on an 80,000ft2 future development site on First Street, just next to HOME.

This October, horror hit and global phenomenon Ghost Stories will play at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre for a strictly limited 8 week season. 

Shakespeare's Globe is preparing to reopen its outdoor theatre on 19 May 2021. Provided the conditions are met for Step 3 of the Government's roadmap for cultural reopening, the Globe will be welcoming audiences in for socially distanced performances, having closed on 18 March 2020.

Today Adam McKenzie Wylie launches Histrionic Production's new multi-sensory theatrical adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 with Sean Holmes and Jon Bausor as Associate Creative Directors. Marked to open in London in early 2021 and America thereafter. The vision is to transform stunning derelict spaces into extraordinary, theatrical dystopian worlds. Histrionic Productions will also curate themed food, drink and music offerings, alongside the core show, to offer a truly immersive experience. Tickets will go on sale in summer 2020.

Shakespeare's Globe has announced the full cast for the 2020 Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production of Macbeth, directed by Cressida Brown. This full-scale, fast-paced production is created especially for young people, and will open on Wednesday 26 February until Wednesday 25 March. This year, the demand was so high that over 18,000 free tickets were allocated to state secondary schools in London and Birmingham in just one day, with thousands more students expected to watch the production during its run.

Shakespeare's Globe has announced the summer season 2020 will include Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Antony & Cleopatra, a two-day event 'Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and Climate Emergency', a symposium 'Shakespeare and Race', a Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production of Macbeth with 20,000 free tickets to school children, the return of family festival 'Telling Tales', and a new dramatisation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by our resident writers.

What you might not expect when sitting down in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a replica Elizabethan indoor theatre, is to see the titular character of Richard III enter on stage wearing football clothes. Granted, it's an unusual twist. Representing a companion to a condensed Henry VI (which squishes three plays into one), what Richard III makes clear from the beginning is that the game to become king is just beginning.

The extraordinary success of Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's Ghost Stories back at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2010 led to multiple runs in London, a film starring Martin Freeman, Paul Whitehouse, and Alex Lawter, and a number of tours and productions all over the world. It's easy to see how the piece achieved all that. The 80-minute straight-through show is filled to the brim with scrumptious spookiness. Directors Dyson, Nyman, and Sean Holmes start playing with their public from the outset of their experience, restricting the information on plot and presentation to a minimum on marketing material and website, daring them to book if they dare.

Shakespeare's Globe has announced the 201920 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Season. Centred around She Wolves and Shrews, the season is a celebration and interrogation of women, power, and the role of the feminine in shaping our past, present and future. The candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse will play host to a world-premiere of Ella Hickson's new play Swive [Elizabeth], Shakespeare's Henry VI, Richard III, and The Taming of the Shrew, and Middleton's Women Beware Women. Sandi and Jenifer Toksvig have written a new family show dubbed, Christmas at the (Snow) Globe, and a series of candlelit ghost tales will include a new story from Jeanette Winterson. Other events running throughout the season include half-term storytelling festival, Half Term Tales at the Globe, with the new Children's Laureate Cressida Cowell, and a double bill of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, marking the centenary year since the removal of the sex disqualification act. The Globe's flagship project for secondary and post-16 students, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank, reaches its 14th year with Macbeth.