By Isabel Sutton
BBC Radio 4
5 January 2014

Fourteen years after the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe, the vision of its founder is about to be fully realised.

The thatched amphitheatre on London’s South Bank now stands cheek by jowl with a brand new, old theatre: the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

This second theatre is designed to replicate the indoor playhouses of the early 17th Century. It’s not a reconstruction of one particular theatre – it’s an archetype of the kind of indoor spaces in which the late romances of Shakespeare, the dark revenge plays of John Webster and the satirical city comedies of Ben Jonson would have been performed.

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