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Love's labour at the Globe
Louise Jury12 Feb 2009
The Globe is to celebrate affairs of the heart with a series of Shakespeare's plays about young love.
Tickets go on sale on Saturday - Valentine's Day - for the 2009 season which also includes three new works, which are described as exploring love "from purity to wild passion".
Ellie Kendrick, who won praise for her performance in the recent BBC adaptation of the life of the Jewish teenager Anne Frank, will play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.
She will take the part during her gap year after leaving Benenden School, in Kent, last summer and before starting at Cambridge University in the autumn.
Kathy Burke was among those who spotted her star potential in the TV series and recommended her.
Thea Sharrock, who directed Equus starring Daniel Radcliffe, will direct her first Shakespeare with As You Like It. The romances continue with Love's Labour's Lost and Troilus and Cressida.
Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe's artistic director, said: "We want to celebrate all the plays [Shakespeare] wrote about young love where he caught the confusion and madness so well. It makes you have young actors who bring energy."
The Globe's education department is presenting a separate production of Romeo and Juliet for schools next month after consulting the Metropolitan Police on the play's knife violence.
Staff met Commander Steve Allen, one of the heads of the Met's battle against knife crime, to ensure the gang violence and stabbings of the plot are handled sensitively. "We have spoken about how to do it thoughtfully, so it doesn't make it something exciting," Mr Dromgoole said.
Another highlight will be a play by Trevor Griffiths on the life of British radical thinker Thomas Paine in his 200th anniversary year.
A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine was originally written as a screenplay which Richard Attenborough has spent 20 years battling to get made.
The US actor Tim Robbins has just revived interest in a film and Barack Obama referred to Paine in his inauguration speech.
The Globe is also reviving The Frontline by Che Walker, a play about nightlife in Camden which premiered last year. It will also present its first Greek drama, a version of Euripides' Helen by Frank McGuinness.
The theatre, which receives no public subsidy, turned a profit last year, selling more than 330,000 tickets with 85 per cent full houses.
