Othello
by William Shakespeare

Opens 4 May
Booking for the 2007 Theatre Season will open on 12 February

The republic of Venice employs Othello, a self-made man and a Moor, to defend its overseas territories against the Turks. But for all his military success, Othello remains an outsider in the city, an object of racism, envy and mistrust. As the Turkish threat gathers and Venetian forces are despatched to Cyprus, Iago, a junior officer secretly enraged by his lack of promotion, exploits Othello’s ambiguous position and ingenuous nature, driving him into a passionate and uncontrollable jealousy.

Performed for the first time at the Globe, Othello, with its racing concentrated plot and intense dramatic details, is one of Shakespeare’s most exciting, atmospheric and heartbreaking plays. By introducing to early 17th-century England a black character as complex as Othello, it is also one of his most extraordinary imaginative achievements.

The production will employ Renaissance staging, costume and music.

by Howard Brenton

Opens 15 May for two weeks
Booking for the 2007 Theatre Season will open on 12 February

A new spirit of philosophical and religious enquiry is growing in 12th-century France. In its vanguard is the brilliant Peter Abelard. When he starts an affair with his student Heloise, his conservative enemies find just the pretext they need to discredit him. In so doing they start a war of ideas that can only involve that arch-priest of medieval mysticism and austerity, Bernard of Clairvaux.

A second chance to see Howard Brenton's critically acclaimed exploration of the greatest love story of the middle ages.

The Merchant of Venice
by William Shakespeare

Opens 2 June 2007
Booking for the 2007 Theatre Season will open on 12 February

Portia, a wealthy heiress of Belmont, sets her suitors a challenge. He who wins it will win her hand; those who lose it will lose her hand and much more. In Venice, city of consumption, speculation and debt, Bassanio borrows money from Antonio to finance his attempt. Antonio, in turn, takes out a loan from the moneylender Shylock. The loan will be repaid when Antonio’s ships return to the city. If they should fail and the money cannot be paid Antonio shall give to Shylock a pound of his own flesh. And they do fail. And Shylock will have his ‘bond’.

Shakespeare dramatises the competing claims of tolerance and intolerance, religion and civil society, justice and mercy, in some of his most electrifying scenes, and in the character of Shylock created one of the most unforgettable outsiders in all theatre. Often misunderstood, sometimes vilified, always controversial, The Merchant of Venice makes a timely return to the Globe after nine years.

The production will employ Renaissance staging, costume and music.

Opens 1 July
Booking for the 2007 Theatre Season will open on 12 February

Self-denial is in fashion at the court of Navarre where the young King and three of his courtiers solemnly forswear all pleasures in favour of serious study. But the Princess of France and her all-too-lovely entourage have other ideas and it isn’t long before young love, with its glad eyes, hesitations and embarrassments, has broken every self-imposed rule of the all-male ‘academe’.

Shakespeare’s boisterous send-up of all those who try to turn their back on life, is a festive parade of every weapon in the youthful playwright’s comic arsenal: from excruciating cross-purposes and impersonations, to drunkenness, bust-ups and pratfalls. Even more, it is a joyful banquet of language, groaning with puns, rhymes, bizarre syntax, grotesque coinages and parodies. This heady combination enjoys its first outing at the Globe this season.

This production will employ Renaissance staging, costume and music.

Opens 28 July
Booking for the 2007 Theatre Season will open on 12 February

England 1837: a country on the cusp of revolution. A young girl is propelled on a journey from a London slum to the servants’ quarters of a great house, and from first love to murder. In her flight from authority she come across the Chartist William Lovett, a man striving to steer a middle course between the brutal coalition of Parliament and Industry and the angry forces gathering against it. But can his rational, moderate voice be heard above the din of government militias on one side and the roaring militancy of Feargus O’Conor on the other?

Ranging from East End squalor to Nottingham mills, Jack Shepherd tells a picaresque tale of tavern assemblies and prize fights, gin palace communists and bullying do-gooders, industrialists and whores, bringing to the Globe for the first time the sordid, violent times of early Victorian England.

Booking for the 2007 Theatre Season will open on 12 February

It is 1787 and the frail government of the recently independent United States of America, menaced by the powers of old Europe and reeling from internal rebellion, is suffering a crisis of identity. What sort of country should America be? Who should govern it? Who belongs in it? Throughout a long, humid, Philadelphia summer, a group of able and passionate men force themselves into one room to argue out the guiding principles of the new nation. What they came up with proves to be one of the most important – and radical – democratic experiments of the last 250 years.

We, The People forges a vivid drama out of the surviving speeches, letters and official documents from that historic moment. Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Washington and many of the other founding fathers, came together at a moment of crisis and created the constitution which the United States still lives within today. We, The People, is a recreation of what they did.