Michelle Terry will leave Shakespeare's Globe at the end of 2027, closing a decade as artistic director, and she will spend part of her final summer back on its stage in a revival of Mother Courage and Her Children.
Shakespeare's Globe has confirmed that Michelle Terry will stand down as artistic director at the end of 2027. The timing is tidy rather than accidental: next year brings ten years since she took the job, twenty since she first acted on the Globe's stages, and thirty since the reconstructed playhouse on Bankside opened in 1997. The Globe has not yet said who will follow her.
Her exit comes with a last starring role. As part of her final summer programme, Terry returns to the Globe Theatre as the title character in Mother Courage and Her Children, reviving the production in which she played Brecht's mother counting the cost of war during the 2026 season. That staging collected four- and five-star notices almost everywhere it was reviewed; Time Out called her "astonishingly good", and The Standard described the production as "a service to the public and to the theatrical canon". The revival plays a limited run from 10 June to 17 July 2027.
Elle While, a Globe associate artist, directs once more from Anna Jordan's translation, with music by the Globe's head of music James Maloney and design by takis. While said that directing Terry "in her last performance on the Globe stage as the Artistic Director of this iconic cultural beacon is the honour of a lifetime."
The figures attached to her tenure explain why the Globe is making something of the moment. By the time she goes, more than 2,000 actors will have been engaged under her leadership, and the 77 productions staged in that period will have been seen by over 2.3 million people from more than 190 countries. Purchases of access tickets have more than doubled over the last five years, and the £5 ticket the Globe has offered since 1997 has held on through a period in which, as Terry puts it in her statement, the organisation has had to balance "our clear charitable purpose and very real commercial imperatives".
New writing ran through her programme. She commissioned 25 new plays, 63% of them by women and 26% by global majority writers, starting with Emilia, which she conceived and commissioned from Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. It transferred from the Globe to the West End's Vaudeville Theatre in 2019 and took three Olivier Awards the following year, Best Entertainment or Comedy Play among them. She also widened the repertoire beyond Shakespeare to take in Ibsen's Ghosts, Miller's The Crucible, Chekhov's Three Sisters and Brecht, and turned the Globe into a Christmas fixture with The Snow Globe, The Fir Tree, Hansel & Gretel and Pinocchio, which returns this December with a company announced last week.
She has kept acting throughout, an unusual double load for the head of a building this size. Since taking over she has played the title roles in Hamlet and Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1, Puck, Olga in Three Sisters, and both Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear.
"I applied for this job because of my love of Shakespeare’s plays and these spaces," Terry said. "It is because of the people who I have had the honour to work with that I leave more astonished by Shakespeare’s plays, more excited about the potential of these playhouses, and more convinced than ever that Theatre is the most necessary of AI-proof art forms." She added: "The ache I feel at saying goodbye is only equal to the love and pride I feel for having been here."
Stella Kanu, the Globe's chief executive, said Terry "was one of the principal reasons I wanted to join the Globe", and that she looked forward to "everything we will continue to build together before she moves on at the end of 2027."
Public booking for Mother Courage and Her Children opens at 10am on Friday 30 October, and Globe members can already book in a pre-sale.
Book Mother Courage and Her Children tickets for its run at the Globe Theatre from 10 June to 17 July 2027.
