Round midnight: Othello is one of the late-night delights at Shakespeare's Globe. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
When Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It that "All the world's a stage", he almost certainly had one particular theatre in mind: the Globe. After all, As You Like It was written in the same year that the Globe, a personal investment and his artistic home, was built. Now summer has arrived, it's our turn to see his world on his stage.
This season Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe's artistic director, gives us Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Love's Labour's Lost, while last summer's hit about Abelard and Heloise, In Extremis, returns. There are also two dramas about people motivated by pieces of paper: Holding Fire!, about the Chartists, and We the People, about the writing of the American constitution in 1787.
Looking through this summer's performance calendar, I'm happiest to see that they have brought back midnight performances, where your competing desires to stay with the drama and to sleep (perchance to dream?) duke it out. It's an unusual experience, especially when you're standing in the yard before the stage as a groundling: I saw Antony and Cleopatra in a midnight performance last summer and almost fell asleep standing up. (Not, I hasten to add, because of the quality of the cast, which included the excellent Frances Barber as the Egyptian queen, but because of my damned body clock.) The next morning, I stumbled into my job in a bookstore, bleary-eyed yet enthused by the play and mumbling something about salad days.
Having to stand through three hours of Elizabethan drama is definitely one of the downsides of going to the Globe. It is the cheaper option - who can refuse Shakespeare for a fiver? - but results in a change of weight-bearing leg every five minutes, like a slow-motion aerobics routine. If fidgeting like this in the theatre annoys you, then stay away from the yard. Saying that, sitting is not actually that comfortable, since most of the seats are wooden benches. I've stood and sat through King Lear there and I don't know which was less uncomfortable. Take a cushion if you're sitting, a tall folding chair if you're with the groundlings.
For me, summer is not complete without going to the Globe, risking London's temperamental weather in an effort to recreate some of what Shakespeare's first audiences would have seen, heard and felt (leg cramps included).
