Meet the new director of the Globe theatre... who has never directed a play
AN actress who has never directed a play is to become the next chief of Shakespeare’s Globe.
Michelle Terry will replace Emma Rice who quit after just five months as artistic director.
Miss Rice, 49, faced complaints over her use of ‘disco’ stage lighting and modern sound equipment in the re-created Elizabethan theatre on the south bank of the Thames in London.
Miss Terry’s directing experience is limited to three short films produced for the Globe’s the Complete Walk project marking the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.
The 38-year-old mother of one won an Olivier Award in 2011 for her role in Tribes at the Royal Court theatre in London.
And she starred in the Globe’s productions of As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
She said: ‘There are no other theatres more perfectly suited to Shakespeare’s plays than the pure and uniquely democratic spaces of the Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. I am so proud and excited.’
Theatre critic Lyn Gardner said that Miss Terry had ‘sharp intelligence and consummate theatre brain’ but the top job would not be easy. ‘The Rice situation reflects internal divisions,’ she wrote in The Stage. ‘It is an organisation caught between those who believe the Globe must not stray from its original mission to explore the conditions Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked in, and those who believe that theatres and spaces must constantly evolve or they become museums.’
Miss Terry takes over next April at the Globe, which said it had 60 applications for the post. Miss Rice is launching a new theatre company at London’s Old Vic.