The new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe has promised to give more power to the casts and audiences of plays, saying she wants to dismantle theatre hierarchies.
Michelle Terry announced a new season opening with Hamlet and As You Like It. Eye-catchingly, none of the actors turning up for rehearsals will know which role they are taking, with the whole ensemble choosing who plays whom.
In a similar vein, when the plays The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night go on tour, some audiences will be able to choose which one they want to see that night.
Terry was announced as the new boss of Shakespeare’s Globe in the summer, succeeding Emma Rice, who was ousted from the job after two seasons.
Some eyebrows were raised because Terry, while a hugely accomplished Shakespearean actor, has never directed. On Thursday Terry said theatre culture was too “director-centric” with “too much responsibility on one person”.
She said there was too much pressure on a director to “solve the plays … Actors are amazing dramaturgs. They will tell you about what works in a play.”
Terry said she wanted to dismantle hierarchies. “It is unfair that everything gets dumped on the director’s shoulders and actually it is a really collaborative process, especially for our theatre, which is one of the most democratic and egalitarian spaces that we’ve got.”
The first two plays will be presented by a Globe ensemble of 12 actors, two co-directors and one designer. The ensemble will decide who plays, for example, Hamlet or Rosalind.
Terry said she had chosen Hamlet and As You Like It because they were both written around 1599, the year the original Globe was built, and were conceived with its architecture in mind.
The democratisation will continue later in the season when one group of eight actors will have to learn three plays. Audiences “every now and then” will be able to choose which play they want to see. How that works remained to be decided, Terry said.
Other productions in the summer 2018 season include Othello, with the American actor André Holland in the lead role alongside Sir Mark Rylance, the Globe’s founding artistic director, as Iago. Rylance’s wife, Claire van Kampen, will direct.
There will also be The Two Noble Kinsmen, directed by Barrie Rutter; The Winter’s Tale, directed by Blanche McIntyre; and Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Nick Bagnall.
Terry promised diversity across the organisation, with the bottom line being: “We just have to do it. We can’t keep talking about it.”
There will be a 50-50 gender split across the season, but at present there are no targets for other areas. “I can’t give you a policy for diversity because it is too complicated, it is too complex,” Terry said. “Actually it is about data collection and some people don’t want to tell you which socio-economic background they are from or what sexuality they are because they have fought their whole lives to not be seen like that.
“If our job is to hold a mirror up to nature then we’ve got to truly reflect the society in which we live.”
Other new measures include allowing people into rehearsals, particularly school parties who might be heartened to see that even the actors don’t understand what some words and lines might mean.
The Globe’s reputation has been somewhat battered by the Rice affair. Rice staged productions that were less traditional, often loud and leftfield. The Globe decided it wanted to return to its core values and have, for example, no amplified sound. Why hire her in the first place, asked some.
Terry said it had been a painful process but many positives could be taken. “I personally think Emma Rice was the best thing ever to have happened to the Globe because it has forced an organisation to really go through what is the most healthy process, it has afforded a time of unbelievable self-reflection for all of us.”
