Shakespeare’s Globe has announced its Summer Season 2026, featuring a wide-ranging programme of classic plays, rarely staged works and new family theatre across the Globe Theatre and Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
The season includes five major productions in the Globe Theatre alongside a family show in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, with more than 180,000 tickets priced at £10 or less and hundreds of £5 tickets available for every performance.
Emily Lim will direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opens the season and runs from 23 April until 29 August 2026.
Michelle Terry will star as Mother Courage in Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war masterpiece translated by Anna Jordan and directed by Globe Associate Artist Elle While, running from 7 May until 27 June.
Chelsea Walker returns to the Globe to direct Much Ado About Nothing, which runs from 11 June until 24 October.
Indiana Lown-Collins makes her Globe directorial debut with Love’s Labour’s Lost, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s comedy running from 17 July until 13 September.
As You Like It will be co-directed by Associate Artistic Director Sean Holmes and Globe Associate Artist Charlie Josephine, running from 14 August until 25 October, with Charlie Josephine playing Orlando opposite Lola Shalam as Rosalind.
Family audiences can also enjoy A World Elsewhere by Kerry Frampton and Ben Hales, directed by Lucy Cuthbertson and co-produced with Splendid Productions, running in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from 25 July until 30 August.
Michelle Terry, Artistic Director, said: “All the plays this season were born out of a world in chaos whether that was the chaos of Shakespeare’s 1599 or Brecht’s 1939. The questions these plays ask are an attempt to make sense of that world: what is love? What is evil? What is power? What is tyranny? What is this life?”
She added: “Neither Shakespeare nor Brecht give us an answer, but they do demand we ask the questions, and as importantly, ask them in a Theatre, where at the very least we are asking them together.”
Terry continued: “Our beautiful wooden ‘O’ stands proudly on the banks of the Thames, connecting 1,600 people at every performance. This human connection is profound: profoundly exciting, profoundly real, and in a world of increasing division, profoundly necessary.”
She concluded: “If you’ve been before, come again! If you’ve never been, try it! Come and experience for yourself the visceral impact of being together, in these magical spaces with these powerful plays, the huge questions they ask, and the hope, courage and comfort that comes from trying to answer them together. And all of that for a fiver.”
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
