Shakespeare’s Globe rarely closes a season quietly, but this year it’s putting genuine skin in the game. Co-director Charlie Josephine – the writer and star of the RSC’s gender-bending Cowbois – is also playing Orlando, opposite Lola Shalam’s Rosalind, in a Forest of Arden that gets repainted, live, at every single performance from 14 August.
A forest that repaints itself
Walk in expecting an eighteenth-century court – all gilt formality and stiff manners – and be prepared to watch it come undone. Over the course of the play, designer Paul Wills and the movement team dissolve that court into Arden on stage, night after night, rather than locking a single scene change into place during tech week. No two audiences quite see the forest arrive the same way twice. Composer Katie Richardson’s original score runs underneath it, doing a fair amount of the emotional work a straighter period staging usually leaves to the text alone.
Why the directing credit actually matters
It’s worth pausing on Josephine’s name rather than skimming past it. Cowbois, their 2023 RSC hit, took the Western – a genre with about as much wiggle room as a swinging saloon door – and rewired it from the inside, casting queer and trans actors in queer and trans roles rather than treating gender as the punchline. As You Like It has been getting away with a gentler version of the same trick for four centuries: Rosalind survives the forest by disguising herself as a young man, Ganymede, and the play has always had more to say about gender than most productions bother digging into. Josephine co-directing, and choosing to step into Orlando rather than stay in the wings, is a fairly clear signal that this Arden is going to lean into that rather than smooth it over for a summer crowd.
Who’s on stage
Lola Shalam’s Rosalind carries most of the plot; Gracie Oddie-James plays Celia, Katherine Pearce is Jaques, and Jonnie Broadbent takes on Touchstone, in a company of fourteen.
Getting in for £5
You don’t need to pay gallery prices to see it. The Globe releases a batch of £5 standing tickets every Friday at 11am for the following week’s performances, through its £5 Rush scheme – non-transferable, first-come-first-served once you’re through the online queue, and still one of the best-value nights out in London theatre when they’re available. Once those go, standing tickets are £10. Seated tickets in the galleries run from around £25 up to £88.
The London x London Take: The £5 Rush is genuinely the smartest way in, so if you can be flexible on which night, it beats gallery prices by a mile. Given Josephine’s form with Cowbois, go in expecting Rosalind’s Ganymede disguise to carry more weight than the usual romantic-comedy gloss – this is shaping up to be the least straightforward As You Like It you’ll see in years .
Need to Know
- Dates: 14 August – 25 October 2026
- Location: Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, London SE1 9DT
- Price: Standing from £5 (Friday rush) or £10; seated £25–£88
- Tickets: shakespearesglobe.com
