Shakespeare’s Globe restarts award-winning Guided Tour with visitors onstage for the first time, alongside an exciting digital festival filmed in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Shakespeare’s Globe restarts award-winning Guided Tour with visitors onstage for the first time, alongside an exciting digital festival filmed from the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
- Globe Theatre tours to reopen taking visitors onstage for the first time
- Digital festival from 21-23 August includes Romeo and Juliet director Ola Ince and actors Alfred Enoch, Rebekah Murrell, and Sargon Yelda
- Globe shop now open online
- Swan Bar & Restaurant takes part in Government’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme
After closing in March this year, the Globe Theatre opens its oak doors once more for guided tours from 21 August. As well as hearing about Shakespeare, the history of London and the renowned theatre itself, visitors will also have a once in a lifetime
chance to stand on one of the most famous stages in the world. Alongside costumes worn by some of the most celebrated actors to have acted at the Globe, there will also be a photography exhibition in the space from theatre photographer Marc Brenner of previously unseen backstage images taken at the Globe during lockdown. An award-winning experience for the young and the young at heart, the tour normally welcomes over 350,000 visitors a year. The Globe’s online shop has now reopened.
Neil Constable, Chief Executive of Shakespeare’s Globe, said: “As an independent charity that currently receives no government subsidy, our hope is that any income raised from this festival will help support the Globe, artists and practitioners, as we all continue to look for new ways to share our work. After being closed for five months, reopening for our wonderful guided tours, giving access to the stage to our visitors for the first time, and the opening of our online shop and the Swan Bar & Restaurant are all ways in which we hope to welcome more and more people back through our doors to safely enjoy culture and experience in our iconic theatre before we are in a position to start performances again.”
Tours will be running seven days a week with six tours a day until 20 September. Tickets must be pre-booked online for time slots to allow for social distancing. The tours happen outside, and precautions due to Covid-19 include hand sanitising stations, deep cleaning of toilets, face shields for the Globe Guides, and further systems to ensure social distancing. The open-air theatre is following all recommended safety measures amending normal operation of the tours to fit with all Covid-19 restrictions.
Online from 21 – 23 August, the Globe launches its first ever digital festival about Shakespeare and Race featuring a new two-part documentary about Romeo and Juliet, monologues from celebrated writers, a panel discussion, a brand-new season of the podcast ‘Such Stuff’, and workshops for 8-14-year olds.
‘Behind Closed Doors: Romeo
and Juliet’ gives a sneak peek into the
world of the rehearsal room where Director Ola Ince and actors Alfred Enoch, Rebekah Murrell, and Sargon Yelda gathered (socially distanced) in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for an honest conversation about Shakespeare, race, beauty, and mental health in the play and the impact this has on them as artists and the audience.
On Saturday 22 August at 7.30pm, a series of new writing ‘Notes to the Forgotten She-Wolves’ celebrates history’s forgotten and unsung women and features three mo ologues from ground-breaking playwrights Nicôle Lecky, Winsome Pinnock and Amanda
Wilkin. These stories write back into history Bessie Coleman, the first woman and person of colour to hold a pilot’s licence; Una Marson, the first
woman of colour to broadcast for the BBC; and Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner, a woman of colour who invented the sanitary belt.
