Next summer the Globe Theatre opens after more than 25 years of

Next summer the Globe Theatre opens after more than 25 years of indifference, disbelief and mockery. It's a surprise to many that the Globe is actually going to put on plays Let alone on this sort of scale. The first season runs from mid-June to mid-September, with a resident company of 32 giving two performances a day, Wednesday through Saturday, with one performance on Sunday Over 15 weeks that adds up to a robust 180 performances. "What we are doing," says chief executive Michael Holden, "is creating an international- level company from square one." There will be no scenery. Only the costume rails need changing, which means they can perform two different Shakespeare plays a day The first one will be at 2.30pm, the second at 6.30pm. Both plays, therefore, will be performed in daylight - the auditorium is only partly covered - with the audience as visible as the actors It's a bigger venue than it looks.

There are seats for 1,000 people, and standing room - round the stage - for a further 500. This makes this sweet little thatched theatre the sixth-largest in London. With the Royal Shakes-peare Company vacating the Barb-ican during the summer months to go on national tours, the Globe will become London's leading venue for Shakespeare It could be a big hit. What theatregoer - from here or abroad - isn't going to want to go there once? What actor isn't going to want to appear on this stage?It's hard to reconcile these facts with the image. The Globe has been dismissed, for instance, by the historian Raphael Samuel, in his new book Theatres of Memory, as "resurrectionary folly".

It has come to be seen as one of those long-runners that might never actually surface, like Richard Attenborough's film of Gandhi and Michael Holroyd's biography of Bernard Shaw (both of which did) or David Lean's film of Nostromo (which didn't). If the Globe did open, then it would be a testament not to the genius of an Elizabethan playwright but to the boisterous persistence of an American actor. It would find its place on the tourist map somewhere between Madame Tussaud's, the London Dungeon and the Hard Rock Cafe. A place, that is, to avoid.The fastidious will find their prejudices reinforced by the Globe Exhibition shop. Here you can buy First Folio T-shirts, Elizabethan greengage preserve, Shakespeare jigsaw puzzles, Shakespeare posters, Shakespeare notebooks, Shakespeare mugs, Shakespeare silver coins and Shakespeare fridge magnets. You can buy a Shakespeare pillow case which bears a quotation from Hamlet: "To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream." The pillow-case designer has taken a small liberty with the text here. After the word "dream", he or she has deleted the all-important "ay, there's the rub" and replaced it with "zzzzzzzz".You can also buy books, including The Shakespearean Stage, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, The Lost Stagecraft and The Quest for Shakespeare's Globe.

The two associations that have dogged the public image of the theatre sit side by side on the shelves: the Globe as rarefied scholarship and the Globe as Disneyland kitsch.THE IDEA for the Globe, or the "dream" or "vision", as it is referred to round the site, was the late Sam Wanamaker's Reverence is a constant danger here First there is Bardolatry, then there's the Wanamyth. When the theatre opens next year, it will be on 14 June, Wanamaker's birthday. A leading American actor and director, Wanamaker came over to England in 1949 and went to look for the site of the original Globe. This was the theatre Shakespeare had moved to in 1599 and for which he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth (among others). Wanamaker walked round Bankside and - so the story goes - all he found was a neglected plaque on a brewery wall.Wanamaker had seen a replica of Shakespeare's Globe at the Chicago World Fair and worked in another at the Great Lakes Festival in Cleveland, Ohio He knew something we didn't.