Theater Shakespeare’s Globe is setting up a new youth company to specialize in Jacobean* period drama.

    Artistic director Dominic Dromgoole said he wanted to find child actors from across “as broad a social spectrum* as possible.”

    The company of 12-16-year-olds will be recruited over the summer and trained during the winter.

    The Globe Young Players’ first production will be “The Malcontent” in April 2014.

    It will be performed at the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s new indoor Jacobean-style theater which is still under construction.

    The formation of the Globe Young Players is in the tradition of the child actor companies of Shakespeare’s time.

    “A lot of the plays of that period were written specifically for boys and we wanted to explore that practice,” Dromgoole explained at Monday’s announcement.

    “It was when someone talked to me about Bugsy Malone that the idea lit up in my head,” he said, with a reference to Alan Parker’s 1976 musical gangster film which boasted a cast of child actors.

    The Globe’s new youth company will consist of both boys and girls from diverse backgrounds.

    “When we were first thinking about this, we thought we could get in a group of boys from Eton or Dulwich or whatever, but that felt wrong somehow because the kid actors of that period would have been from all parts of the social spectrum — marked out by their ability and hunger to act.”

    He added: “It’s becoming harder for children and young actors without means to get into drama school and I think that’s an enormous shame.”(SD-Agencies)