Kate Duchêne takes the title role in Shakespeare’s Globe’s Julius Caesar, one of four actors in Joe Hill-Gibbins’s candlelit staging at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which begins on 6 November 2026.
Kate Duchêne will play Caesar in the Globe’s new Julius Caesar, and doubles as the Soothsayer and Octavius Caesar. With the full company now named, the production opens the Globe’s 2026-27 winter season in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the first time the play has been staged in the indoor theatre.
Caoilfhionn Dunne, whose stage credits include A Small and Quiet Light at the Orange Tree and the Minerva Theatre, is Brutus. Natey Jones plays Cassius, having worked at the National Theatre in The Grapes of Wrath and with the RSC and Hampstead Theatre in Titus Andronicus. Adam Gillen, a Globe regular whose work there takes in I, Joan, Henry VIII and Romeo and Juliet, is Mark Antony. Duchêne also has a Globe credit already, in Henry VIII.
Four actors carry the whole play, then, with Duchêne covering the dictator, the Soothsayer who warns him about the Ides of March, and the heir who rises in the war that follows the assassination.
Joe Hill-Gibbins, who staged Ghosts in the same candlelit room, directs and has adapted the text. The plot is hatched by senators uneasy at how much power Caesar has gathered; after the assassination the crowd swings against the conspirators and Rome slides into civil war. The Globe is pitching the evening at an audience placed in the role of Rome’s citizens.
“I’m so excited to bring this timely story, performed by a company of four incredible actors, to audiences in the Wanamaker this winter,” said Hill-Gibbins. “Reviving a classic play in front of a contemporary audience creates a kind of time machine, which allows us to pull the past into the present and for our present to inhabit the past.”
Design is by Rosanna Vize and candlelight design by Charles Balfour. The score is by co-composers Louise Anna Duggan and Zands Duggan, who work together as the percussion duo Minihi and also play in the company. Joana Nastari is movement and intimacy director, Annemette Verspeak works on voice and text, and Lucy Wray is associate director. Casting is by Becky Paris CDG, the Globe’s head of casting, with Alice Walters as casting associate.
Performances of Julius Caesar start on Friday 6 November 2026, press night is Tuesday 17 November 2026, and the run continues until Sunday 14 February 2027. The production contains depictions of war, suicide and violence.
