Shakespeare Venues

21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, SE1 9DT

Sam Wanamaker spent 25 years fighting to rebuild it. He died of lung cancer on 18 December 1993, four years before the thatched roof went on.

Waterside, CV37 6BB

A short walk from Shakespeare's birthplace and an even shorter one from Holy Trinity Church where he is buried, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is home to the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has staged Shakespeare here continuously since 1961. The main house holds 1,040 people on a thrust stage — a configuration where the stage projects into the middle of the audience, surrounding it on three sides rather than framing it behind a traditional arch.

South Bank, SE1 9PX

Laurence Olivier opened the National Theatre Company's first season on 22 October 1963 with a production of Hamlet at the Old Vic, directing Peter O'Toole in the title role. Since moving to its permanent South Bank home in 1976, the National has staged Shakespeare continuously across three auditoria: the Olivier (1,150 seats), the Lyttelton (890 seats), and the Dorfman, formerly the Cottesloe (up to 450 seats). Major Shakespeare productions in recent years have included Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo in Antony and Cleopatra (2018, directed by Simon Godwin), Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear in Othello (2013, directed by Nicholas Hytner), and Simon Russell Beale in King Lear (2014).

Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS

For twenty years, from 1982 to 2002, the Barbican was the Royal Shakespeare Company's London home. Every production that opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford transferred here, making the Barbican the primary address for major Shakespeare in the capital for two decades.

Eccleston Street, Prescot, L34 5QL

Prescot, twelve miles east of Liverpool, spent four hundred years without anyone remembering it once had one of the only purpose-built indoor playhouses in Elizabethan England. An acting company patronised by the local Stanley family — Lord Strange's Men, one of the most prominent companies in England in the early 1590s — later dissolved and its members helped form the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company Shakespeare wrote for at the Globe.

30b Grindlay Street, EH3 9AX

The Royal Lyceum Theatre opened on 10 September 1883 with a production of Much Ado About Nothing starring Henry Irving and Ellen Terry — two of the most celebrated actors on the Victorian stage. The building, designed by C.J.

13-29 Nicolson Street, EH8 9FT

The Festival Theatre is Edinburgh's largest theatre, holding 1,915 seats on Nicolson Street in the Southside. It is a receiving house — it programmes visiting productions rather than making its own — and is the main Edinburgh address for large-scale touring Shakespeare, opera, and ballet. Opened in 1994 after converting the shell of the Victorian Empire Theatre (1892), the Festival Theatre is managed by Capital Theatres alongside the King's Theatre.

St Ann's Square, M2 7DH

The Royal Exchange is the largest theatre-in-the-round in the world, and one of the most distinctive performance spaces in Britain: a seven-sided glass-and-steel module suspended inside the vast Victorian hall of Manchester's former cotton exchange. The 700-seat auditorium surrounds the stage on all sides, placing no audience member more than a few rows from the action — a configuration that suits Shakespeare's direct address and intimate verse far better than a conventional proscenium. The company stages a year-round season that regularly includes Shakespeare and other classics alongside new writing and musicals, and it has a long reputation for spotting talent early — Kate Winslet, David Tennant, Andrew Garfield and Hugh Grant all appeared here before they were widely known.

Raleigh Road, Southville, BS3 1TF

Tobacco Factory Theatres is an intimate, in-the-round venue in the Southville district of Bristol, housed — as the name says — in a converted Edwardian cigarette factory. The main 250-seat auditorium surrounds a small square stage on all four sides, and the closeness of that space has given the venue a national reputation for stripped-back, text-led Shakespeare: uncluttered productions where the verse and the acting carry the evening rather than spectacle. The building's Shakespeare programming has been led for many years by the work first established as Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, and the theatre stages a Shakespeare or classic production most years, typically in the late-winter-to-spring window, alongside a broad programme of new writing, family shows, comedy, music and opera across its spaces.