This summer at Shakespeare's Globe: Michelle Terry's first season

TOP PICK: Othello

As the founding artistic director of The Globe, Mark Rylance is an expert of staging and performing Shakespeare. Along with roles on the West End, Broadway and in Hollywood blockbusters, he's built a career bringing Shakespeare to life. So it's quite the coup for Michelle Terry to tempt Rylance back for the new season. He will play Iago opposite award-winner André Holland (Moonlight and Selma) as Othello, with Claire van Kampen directing. The last time husband and wife duo Mark Rylance and Claire van Kampen worked together at The Globe it was for the charming Farinelli and the King, which went on to impress on the West End and Broadway.

So we recommend booking pronto for this production for Othello.

Hamlet

The season opens with two of Shakespeare's best-loved plays, performed alongside each other in rep. Hamlet and As You Like were both written around 1599, at the same time the original Globe Theatre was built. Now, as the reconstructed playhouse turns 21, the summer season will open with the best-known, most-quoted tragedy.

As You Like It

Balancing out the self-doubt and death toll of Hamlet is the pastoral idyll of As You Like It. With marvellously strong-minded Rosalind, cross-dressing and poetry hidden in the trees and brooks, it's an ideal show for summer evenings. The Globe Ensemble, a group of artists headed by new artistic director Michelle Terry, will work on both Hamlet and As You Like It together, exploring them 'as if for the first time'.

Two Noble Kinsmen

Barrie Rutter, the founder of Northern Broadsides theatre company, directs a lesser-known, rarely performed late play co-written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The Jacobean play draws on romance, epic, Medieval verse and Greek tragedy to tell the story of prisoners Paloman and Arcite, and the beautiful Emilia. ‘The invitation to direct a play with so little stage history comes with great dollops of intrigue, relish and excitement,' says Rutter.

The Winter's Tale

Director Blanche McIntyre (Comedy of Errors, 2014; As You Like It, 2015) returns to The Globe to explore the fantastical world of The Winter's Tale. Intense emotions, strange creatures and marvellous resurrections and reunions make this late problem play one of the most interesting to stage.

Emilia

Up and coming playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm explores Shakespeare's elusive muse in the world premiere of Emilia. Based on the few facts we know about Emilia Bassano, the supposed 'Dark Lady' of the sonnets, the play goes beyond this legacy to explore Emilia's own achievements, as a poet, mother and proto-feminist.

After the exuberant five-star Nell Gwyn The Globe has a reputation for smart, entertaining new writing written for its traditonal setting.

Love's Labours Lost

Shakespeare's lively comedy about the Princess of France and her entourage arriving in an all-male college comes to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse this summer. Instead of the large, open air Elizabethan Globe Theatre, the Wanamaker playhouse offers intimacy, candlelight and shelter from showers. At the helm of the production is Nick Bagnall, associate director of the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse.

Eyam

An outbreak of plague in rural Derbyshire takes centre stage in a new play by Matt Hartely. Eyam is set in 1665, when a village must weigh up civil responsibility and survival instinct, to decide whether to stay quarantined or travel and risk spreading the deadly plague.

'It is a vital time in our history to be asking ourselves what our collective responsibility is, and what sacrifices we’d be willing to make for the betterment of all society,' says director Adele Thomas.