Pop-up Globe returns for summer
A new Pop-up Globe season will open in December, organisers have announced.
But it never actually popped down this time around. The Popup Globe, a temporary reconstruction of Shakespeare’s original 17th century Globe Theatre was not dismantled from its location near Auckland’s Ellerslie Racecourse - and so will return for a third season in the same spot.
Conceived by Auckland’s Dr Miles Gregory, it was first held in a city centre car park before moving to its Ellerslie location. Its popularity has expanded overseas and it is currently playing a Melbourne season.
The new season will take on five different Shakespeare plays - the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens the season on December 7, and is followed by Julius Caesar, the Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors and Macbeth. Notably, after criticisms of past seasons that casts were heavily male-dominated, the production of Julius Caesar will be gender-reversed, with 11 female and two male roles.
Gregory first conceived of the idea when he was reading his daughter a pop-up book, which featured London’s Globe Theatre. She asked if she could go to it, but from Auckland that would take some doing. But the moment inspired a vision that lifelong Shakespeare scholar Gregory could just not let go of.