Globe Names Oz Othello, Launches First-Ever TourDate: 6 February 2007
Eamonn Walker (pictured) is to play the title role in Othello in this year’s Renaissance + Revolution repertory season at Shakespeare’s Globe (See News, 25 Jan 2007), artistic director Dominic Dromgoole announced today, when he also revealed that American director Wilson Milam and Oscar-winning composer Stephen Warbeck will be joining the Globe’s creative team.
As well as two Shakespeare plays new to the Globe – Othello (opening on 4 May) and Love’s Labours Lost – and one previously seen nine years ago - The Merchant of Venice - Dromgoole also announced further details of two premieres, Holding Fire! by Jack Shepherd and We the People by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, along with plans for the Globe’s first UK touring company and first-ever international visit, to North Korea.
Walker is best known from the American HBO prison series Oz, screened in the UK on Channel 4.This will be the first time the British-born actor has played the role of Othello on stage, although in 2001 he starred as ‘John Othello’ opposite Christopher Ecclestone’s ‘Jago’ in Andrew Davies’ modern TV adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. “Eamonn is a very extraordinary actor,” said Dromgoole. “I saw him a lot in the early Nineties before he went to America and he’s one of our finest black actors.”
An American director who trained with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Company, Wilson Milam’s West End credits include Killer Joe, Hurly Burly and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which transferred to Broadway in 2006, earning a Tony Award nomination. “He is one of the best naturalistic directors of actors and relationships and will bring something very particular and special to Othello, which is a very tightly focussed domestic tragedy,” said Dromgoole.
Othello will be designed by Dick Bird, who has worked on designs for The Enchanted Pig at the Young Vic, The Night Season at the National, and Harvest at the Royal Court. Stephen Warbeck, best known as a film composer, with credits including Shakespeare in Love and Billy Elliot, will provide new music for the production.
Rebecca Gatward, who recently directed The Indian Boy and co-directed The Canterbury Tales for the RSC, joins the creative team to direct The Merchant of Venice (in rep from 2 June to 6 October 2007), which returns to the Globe after a nine-year absence.
Dromgoole himself will be directing the venue’s first-ever production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, with design by Jonathan Fensom, whose recent theatre work includes Journey’s End in the West End and on Broadway, Talking to Terrorists for the Royal Court and Smaller in the West End.
Dromgoole emphasised the central importance of the Globe’s new writing programme, which begins this year with the return of Howard Brenton’s Whatsonstage.com Award-nominated In Extremis for a two-week run from 15 May 2007. “The new writing programme reminds people that this is the greatest writer’s theatre of all time,” he said, adding that In Extremis had “such an extraordinary response from audiences last year that we were determined to bring it back with the same creative team.”
The two new commissioned plays, Shepherd’s Holding Fire!, a large-scale history play about the 1830s Chartist movement, and Schlosser’s We the People, an account of the drawing-up of the American constitution in 1787, both celebrate democratic revolutions and both send out a “political wake-up call”, said Dromgoole. “I don’t mean party political. It’s just that both plays deal with the importance of participation in democracy and the fact that a vote means more than disposing of Jade Goody from the Big Brother house. The Globe is the most democratic space I have ever worked in and it’s well-suited to those sorts of arguments.”
Shepherd has worked at the Globe many times before, both as an actor and director and is the author of Chasing the Moment (in which he is currently acting at the Arcola Theatre). Holding Fire! will be directed by Mark Rosenblatt, artistic director of Dumbfounded Theatre, currently an associate company at the Young Vic.
Schlosser’s best-selling books include Reefer Madness and Fast Food Nation, the film version of which is due for release in 2007. We the People ‘s director is Charlotte Westenra, whose credits include Gladiator Games at Sheffield and Stratford East) and Kiss of the Spider Woman, opening at the Donmar Warehouse on 19 April.
Dromgoole also announced that the Globe is to tour the UK for the first time, with a small company of Elizabethan-style travelling players taking Romeo and Juliet to a variety of non-theatrical spaces. “There is a huge market within this country for Shakespeare in the open air, which is serviced by companies of intensely variable talent. We are very keen to move into that market and to tour plays smaller than the Globe but achieved and created in the same way that we work here, just as 400 years ago they used to tour out of here all the time.
“We would like to do a lot more touring in the future, not only in England but internationally as well because I think it could be rather a revelation," he continued, after revealing that the Globe will be transferring Love’s Labour’s Lost to the National Theatre of Korea at the end of 2007.
This year’s Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations at the Globe include free Italian-themed family events on 22 April and, in cooperation with the BFI, silent Shakespeare films projected onto the building on 23 April.
“Overall the forthcoming season represents five companies doing seven plays,” said Dromgoole, “which is as much, if not more, than this place has ever attempted.”
Public booking for the Globe’s summer season opens on 12 February 2007.
- by Roger Foss
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