The Winter’s Tale, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

In a monumental first for Shakespeare’s Globe, associate artistic director Sean Holmes (The Tempest, Hamlet, Twelfth Night) presents a production of The Winter’s Tale that makes use of both the theatre’s candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and its outdoor auditorium, which usually remains closed in winter. The audience travels with the story from the stiff court of Sicilia in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to the more care-free, pastoral lands of Bohemia in the Globe Theatre – presumably come wind, rain or snow.

One of Shakespeare’s trickier plays, the tragicomedy sees the intensely jealous King Leontes wrongly accuse his pregnant wife Hermione of infidelity – an accusation which leaves her presumed dead and his baby daughter Perdita abandoned. Perdita is in fact being raised by simple country folk in Bohemia, and all is revealed when a reckoning reunites the family in the court some 16 years later.

The production marks the start of the theatre’s Folio 400th Anniversary celebrations, and its convention-defying, promenade shift between auditoriums is bound to make it a memorable one. Here’s hoping Holmes’s Bohemia is merry enough to warm the cockles on cold winter nights.