Shakespeare's Globe On Screen 2015
Theatre news
THE FIFTH season of Globe On Screen includes five new productions, featuring the critically-acclaimed The Duchess of Malfi starring Gemma Arterton, the inaugural production in the new candlelit Jacobean theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
Other productions include four shows from the Globe’s Summer 2014 Arms and the Man season: Globe Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole’s sell-out envisioning of Roman classic Julius Caesar, an iconic struggle between love and duty in Antony & Cleopatra, the return of Lucy Bailey’s notoriously bloody Titus Andronicus, and the uproariously chaotic The Comedy of Errors.
The new season will be screening in cinemas throughout the UK as well as in selected locations across North America, Australasia and Europe. Tickets for Globe On Screen’s 2015 season will go on sale in January.
The Duchess of Malfi – Thursday, February 26.
The widowed Duchess of Malfi longs to marry her lover, the steward Antonio. But her rancorous brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal, are implacably opposed to the match. When their spy, Bosola, discovers that the Duchess has secretly married and carries Antonio’s child, they exact a terrible and horrific revenge.
Marking Hollywood star Gemma Arterton’s return to the Globe in the title role, The Duchess of Malfi proved a truly sensational curtain-raiser for the very first season in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, with sold-out performances throughout its run.
A thrilling combination of brilliant coup-de-théâtre and vivid characters this Globe On Screen production is the first ever theatrical production to be filmed entirely in candlelight – a unique and unmissable opening for the 2015 cinema season.
Titus Andronicus – Thursday, March 26.
Returning to Rome from a war against the Goths, the general Titus Andronicus brings with him the queen Tamora and her three sons as prisoners of war. Titus’ sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son to appease the ghosts of his dead sons and his decision to refuse to accept the title of emperor initiates a terrible cycle of mutilation, rape and murder. And all the while, at the centre of the nightmare, there moves the villainous, self-delighting Aaron.
Grotesquely violent and daringly experimental, Titus Andronicus was the smash hit of Shakespeare’s early career, and is written with a ghoulish energy he was never to repeat elsewhere. This production revisited director Lucy Bailey’s spectacular Globe production of 2006 and caused a stir throughout the UK media with staged violence so visceral that it caused many audience members to faint.
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Julius Caesar – Thursday, April 30.
When Caesar returns to Rome from the wars a virtual dictator, Brutus and his republican friends resolve that his ambition must be curbed – which in Rome can mean only one thing: the great general must be assassinated. But once the deed is done, the idealistic conspirators have to reckon with the forces of a new power bloc, led by Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew Octavius. When their armies close at Philippi, will Caesar’s ghost be avenged?
Opposing dictatorship and republicanism, private virtue and mob violence, Shakespeare’s tense political drama reveals the conflicting loyalties between men in power, with themes that still resonate today.
This sell-out production employed authentic Renaissance costumes and staging, and Dominic Dromgoole’s impassioned interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s classic plays showcased ‘a rapport between the performers and the audience that feels genuinely magical’ (Daily Telegraph).
Antony & Cleopatra – Thursday, June 4.
Cleopatra (Eve Best), the alluring and fascinatingly ambiguous Queen of Egypt, has bewitched the great Mark Antony, soldier, campaigner and now one of the three rulers of the Roman Empire. When Antony quarrels with his fellow leaders and throws in his lot with Cleopatra, his infatuation threatens to split the Empire in two.
Antony & Cleopatra picks up Antony’s story many years after Julius Caesar. Virtue and vice, transcendent love and realpolitik combine in Shakespeare’s greatest exploration of the conflicting claims of sex and power, all expressed in a tragic poetry of breathtaking beauty and magnificence.
The Comedy of Errors – Thursday, June 25.
Take one pair of estranged twin brothers (both called Antipholus), and one pair of estranged twin servants (both called Dromio), keep them in ignorance of each other and throw them into a city with a reputation for sorcery, and you have all the ingredients for theatrical chaos. One Antipholus is astonished by his foreign hospitality; the other enraged by the hostility of his home town. The Dromios, caught between the two, are soundly beaten for obeying all the wrong orders.
Basing his plot on a farce by Plautus, Shakespeare caps the mayhem of his Roman original to build up a hectic tale of violent cross-purposes, furious slapstick and social nightmare.
The final Globe On Screen film for 2015 brings the perfect light relief to close an epic season of war and tragedy. This sell-out production employed authentic Renaissance costumes and staging and with ‘plenty of physical fun with masters and servants hurling everything possible, including a dried octopus, at each other’ (Guardian), it will have cinema audiences roaring with laughter.
Read about the Globe’s 2015 Summer Season Justice and Mercy