Some 50 productions filmed in performance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater will be available to watch online, the theater announced on Tuesday. Homegrown productions, like an all-male “Twelfth Night” with Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry, as well as 35 foreign-language productions that were part of the “Globe to Globe’ festival during the 2012 Cultural Olympics will be offered. Each film costs about $6.50 to rent or $13 to buy.
The website also offers free content, including prominent literary and theatrical figures like Harold Bloom, Fiona Shaw and Ian McKellen speaking about Shakespeare, and “The Sonnet Project,” which will eventually offer all 154 sonnets in different locations in New York.
Although a number of theaters have joined opera and ballet in live-streaming work, the Globe, a 1997 reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse where many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed, is “the first theater with its own dedicated video-on-demand platform,” said Dominic Dromgoole, the artistic director of the Globe, in a news release.
An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of one actor. He is Ian McKellen, not McKellan.