Exciting news for fans of both Shakespeare and Halloween! The Globe Theatre has announced a new digital festival, which will be streamed online from 31 October – 9 November. Entitled Shakespeare and Fear, it will be filmed in the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

The festival will open with a showing of Deep Night, Dark Night - a film about ghost stories, both old and new, on the 31 October. The film features stories from Edgar Allan-Poe, alongside brand-new stories by Sami Ibrahim and Abi Zakarian, which have been created specifically for the venue.

This will be followed by Macbeth: A Conjuring, which is a full-length, socially distanced, staged reading of the Bard’s Scottish play. The 2018 production starred Paul Ready and Michelle Terry, who will be reunited with the cast of the critically-acclaimed production for the first time in two years. It will be released on Bonfire Night and will be available for 7 days.

There will also be a discussion taking place on 8 November. In Conversation: Fear in our Moment will see a panel of artists, arts leaders and thinkers, including Professor Bridget Escolme (Professor of Theatre and Performance, Queen Mary University) and Stella Kanu (Executive Director at LIFT), come together to explore the questions of fear and its impact on all our lives.

The whole family can get involved in the spooky goings on too, by tuning into one of the interactive ‘how-to’ workshops lined up to take place. Secrets of the Stage will run on the 31 October at 11am and 3pm. Participants in the workshops will explore the spooky secrets of the Globe’s stages, featuring the Globe’s Head of Props and Head of Wigs and Make-up. There’s also the opportunity to learn how to make stage blood, stage make-up, gooey eyeballs and more gruesome stuff! Participants in the workshops will be sent a list of ‘around the home’ materials needed beforehand.

The festival will close on 9 November with Thinking through Crisis: Shakespeare and America. The conversation between experts and academics, Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, Professor Ayanna Thompson (ASU) and James Shapiro (Columbia), will examine the dynamic between Shakespeare and social justice, race, fear and crisis. The event will be held on Zoom and audience members will be able to send in questions to the panel. It will then be available to watch later on the Globe’s YouTube channel.

Artistic Director, Michelle Terry, said: "In 1605 there was a plague. Theatres in London were closed. In 1606 Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. There is not one mention of the plague in Macbeth, but fear is mentioned nearly fifty times. Shakespeare chose not to talk about the virus, but look instead at how disease, doubts, fears and horrible imaginings can infect a mind, a country, a world, and how, out of chaos, instability and disorder, the crisis that emerges becomes an opportunity not only for ruthless ambition and terrorising confusion, but also a catalyst for hope, transformation and positive collective action. With Halloween, Bonfire Night, and the results of an election determining the future of the free world, there feels like no better time to be sharing these stories and having this conversation about the power of insurrection and the potential for resurrection."

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