Shakespeare's Globe announces 2014 season, marking centenary of WWI

Shakespeare’s Globe 2014 summer season will include four Shakespeares and four new plays by award-winning writers Richard Bean, Howard Brenton, David Eldridge and Simon Armitage. Running under the banner “Arms and the Man”, the programme in the main, open air auditorium is themed around two major anniversaries marked next year: the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and the centenary of the start of the First World War.

New, large-scale drama

The four new plays mounted will be: Simon Armitage’s The Last Days of Troy (first seen at Manchester’s Royal Exchange before transferring to the Globe from 10 June 2014), David Eldridge's Holy Warriors (from 19 July), Howard Brenton's Dr Scroggy’s War (from 12 September), and Richard Bean’s Pitcairn (co-produced with Out of Joint and Chichester Festival Theatre, at the Globe from 22 September).

Dr Scroggy’s War follows 19-year-old Jack Twigg on his journey to the trenches of the First World War and back, and explores his relationship with pioneering medic Harold Gillies, the founding father of plastic surgery. It’s written by Brenton and directed by John Dove, the team behind the WhatsOnStage Award-winning Best New Play Anne Boleyn.

Eldridge’s Holy Warriors is a kaleidoscopic tale of holy war and bloody revenge in the struggle for Jerusalem, taking in over two millennia of conflict. James Dacre directs.

Pitcairnis Bean’s brutal telling of the colonisation of the remote island of Pitcairn by Fletcher Christian and the Bounty mutineers. It’s directed by Max Stafford-Clark and designed by Tim Shortall. Bean’s recent credits include One Man, Two Guvnors at the National and in the West End.

Award-winning poet and novelist Armitage’s The Last Days of Troy dramatises and completes the narrative of Homer’s Iliad, bringing the siege of Troy to its bloody conclusion. It’s directed by Nick Bagnall, designed by Ashley Martin Davies and composed by Alex Baranowski.

Shakespearean conflict and two years on the road

The battle theme continues with new productions of Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra (from 17 May) and Julius Caesar (from 20 June), the latter helmed by Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. There’s also a new Blanche McIntyre staging of The Comedy of Errors (from 30 August), and a revisiting of Lucy Bailey’s bloody 2006 production of Titus Andronicus (from 24 April).

Next year’s touring productions will be a global tour of Hamlet to every single country on earth, a revival of this year’s King Lear, a mid-scale reworking of Dromgoole’s 2013 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing.

The Globe will also present A Midsummer Night’s Dream in British Sign Language by Deafinitely Theatre, All’s Well That Ends Well in Gujarati and Lope de Vega’s Punishment Without Revenge in Spanish, as part of the international Globe to Globe programme.

The Hamlet tour will open at the Globe on 23 April 2014 – the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth – and go on to tour over 70 venues in Europe, South America and the Caribbean. Over the course of the entire two-year project, the company will travel to hundreds of venues across the seven continents by boat, sleeper train, jeep, tall ship, bus and airplane.