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It feels very abstract to be talking about a winter anything right now. Nonetheless: time marches on and in a few months’ time we’ll be moaning about the lack of sun and how cold we are and ready for the indoor winter season at Shakespeare’s Globe, which has been announced today.
Well, kind of indoor. There will be two productions in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. First off, a bilingual English and Welsh take on Romeo and Juliet entitled Romeo a Juliet (Nov 5-8). A co-production with Wales’s Theatr Cymru and directed by its artistic director Steffan Donnelly, it will apparently function as a study of the struggle for Welsh identity. There’s not much information on exactly how it’ll work yet and you'll have to be quick to catch it – it’s only on for a week.
The big event Bard-wise is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Nov 13-Jan 31 2025), which has been performed millions of times at the Globe but never indoors, for obvious season related reasons. It’s a co-production with the ever exiting touring company Headlong, directed by Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hayat. We don’t really know what to expect, but it’ll apparently explore the darker corners of the play.
An outdoor Christmas show has been a Globe tradition in recent years, and these have typically been fairly short, fairly low budget, and staged fairly early in the day compared to summer shows in the main theatre. But for Christmas 2025 the Globe is going big with Pinocchio (Nov 29-Jan 4 2026), a new musical adaptation: not of the fairly weird Disney film, but of the much weirder novel by Carlo Collodi that it was based upon. It’s adapted by playwright Charlie Josephine with songs by Jim Fortune and will be directed by Globe deputy Sean Holmes, who also directed Josephine’s last play Cowbois. Expect a relatively quirky, lo-fi affair, but also expect an actual full musical.
And that’s your lot for now – there should be two further Wanamaker plays early in 2026 that’ll make up the second half of the indoor winter season, but they’re being announced at a later date.
Public booking for the Globe’s winter 2025 season opens July 4.