Female playwright to mark Globe Theatre first

London'sfamed Globe Theatre will stage its first-ever production penned by a female playwright during its new season, dubbed Kings and Rogues.

Artistic director Dominic Dromgoole unveiled on Monday details of the Globe's forthcoming slate of productions, including two new plays.

Nell Leyshon's play Bedlam is a fictional account of the London facility that was Western Europe's oldest psychiatric hospital.

In her 18th century-set production, Leyshon explores a time when mental illness wasn't well understood or treated and common practices included shackling patients like prisoners and selling tickets for hospital visitors to poke, prod and generally mock the patients.

Leyshon, who called it a "challenge" and a "great privilege" to be the first female playwright featured at the Globe, added that her goal was "to prove that women can do big stories. It's been said too often that women can't."

Anne Boleyn, a new play by Howard Brenton, will also be featured at the Globe. The drama provides a new look at the life and the legacy of King Henry VIII's doomed second wife.

Appropriately, the troupe has also decided to mount Shakespeare's rarely staged Henry VIII the first since the original Globe Theatre burned down during a performance of the play in June 1613.

"Normally I would think that Henry VIII would be box office poison, but we seem to be living in a period of Tudor gold dust at the moment. There is something strange and magical about that time for us," Dromgoole told reporters.

The curtain will rise on the Kings and Rogues season on the Bard's birthday, April 23, with the lineup also to include Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dreamand new productions of Henry IV parts 1 and 2.

The company, which visited a host of U.S. universities last fall, will also take The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream on the road to a host of U.K. and European cities in the summer.