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2008 Theatre Season
Totus Mundus
'Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (The whole world is a playhouse) is thought to have been the motto of the first Globe. It spoke of a gloriously robust Elizabethan ambition, a desire to brook no boundaries in the new playhouse’s field of imagination. It is an ambition which has been taken up by the reconstructed Globe. Within its open and expansive architecture, fired up by the energy and excitement of its unquenchable audience, the new and Globe has respected no limits to what it aims to achieve.
No one stretched that ambition further than Shakespeare, and this year we celebrate the glorious unruly diversity of his work. In form and in content, he was never content to rest, never tempted to repeat himself, always searching to kick his muse awake by taking on a new corner of the human heart, and encasing it in a bold new form. This year we perform his most searching tragedy, King Lear; his most wild and inventive comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; his most thrilling and savage satire, Timon of Athens, and his invention of a new form, the sit-com, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
To add to the fun of the party we are premiering two expansive new works, Ché Walker’s ultra-modern, wild and panoramic look at London on a Saturday night, The Frontline, and Glyn Maxwell’s beautiful and engaging narrative from the French Revolution, Liberty. Both satisfy the Globe’s hunger for big stories, intoxicating language, and much life.
We’re also extending our Global reach this coming summer. Last year, our first ever open-air tour was a resounding success with Romeo & Juliet playing to delighted audiences around the UK. This year we will be returning to many of the same venues with The Winter’s Tale, and Romeo & Juliet takes to the road again on a national and European tour. We bring some of that international energy back to the Globe by welcoming Footsbarn, a Cornish company of thirty years’ standing, who now have an enormous global following, with their Shakespeare Party.
It is wonderful to think that a reconstructed theatre, that opened more in hope than expectation eleven years ago, in a then empty and derelict region called Bankside, is now capable of embracing so much of human life into its own wooden circle, and is now so proud to spread that ineffable Globe spirit elsewhere.
All the world drives the playhouse.
Dominic Dromgoole
Artistic Director
The 2008 theatre season will run from Wednesday 23 April, Shakespeare's Birthday, until Sunday 5 October.