Behind the scenes at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Standing in the theatre's empty pit on a sunny April afternoon, surrounded by scaffolding, it's hard to imagine that this airy space will soon become an intimate candlelit venue. Luckily, Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, head of the Globe's Architecture Research Group is on hand to fire my imagination. She talks me through the two-tiered oak seating galleries that will form a U-shape around a stage a quarter of the size of the Globe's; the chandeliers of candles; the painted tapestries that will adorn the back wall, and the timber ceiling, which will be painted in a Jacobean palette of greens, reds, and ochre and will hide a small rehearsal space in the roof. "We think that in Shakespeare's Blackfriars, there was a fencing school upstairs," she explains. There's another unusual detail. The seats lining the central aisle, she tells me, will leave the audience facing one another and having to turn their heads 45 degrees to see the stage. "That's the way they're mapped out in the drawings, which we've used as a spatial map for the auditorium," she explains. That's going to be the big experiment really, along with the candles. The drawings to which Karim-Cooper refers are a set of plans for a London indoor theatre found in Worcester College, Oxford, in the Sixties. Originally thought to have been drawn in 1616 by the architect Inigo Jones, they caused something of a crisis when, in 2005, they were discovered to have been the work of Jones's protégé John Webb and completed in the mid to late 17th century, outside of Shakespeare's lifetime. "It left everybody reeling because we had our building already," says Karim-Cooper, who went on to marshal a five-year debate on how the build should be completed. "Mark Rylance [the Globe's previous artistic director] actually called from New York and said that we should take it down and just build an Elizabethan hall," she tells me. In 2010, the drawings were further identified as conceptual plans for a theatre that was probably never constructed. At this point, the team made "a conscious choice to shape the theatre into what we wanted it to be," says Karim-Cooper. We asked ourselves, if we were a Jacobean theatre company building a theatre, what tools, methods, materials and aesthetic would we have at our disposal? Step forward master builder Peter McCurdy, whose extensive experience constructing historic buildings includes the Globe itself. I meet him at his yard in Berkshire where, standing on the top tier of a mock-up of one of the seating galleries, he tells me what the real deal will look like. CGI interior from stage corner of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Designs by Allies + Morrison) Everything you see in the structure [of the galleries] will be oak, but the seating will be European softwood, which we were actually importing in the 16th and 17th century. Later, in a workshop full of intricately carved columns, I watch one carpenter chiselling a joint into shape, and am unsurprised to learn that it has taken McCurdy's team seven months to craft the theatre's timber interior. Two days after my visit, the first of over a dozen deliveries will set off for London. "Manufacturing off-site has a long historical tradition," McCurdy tells me. It goes back 700 years. Once the interior is complete Martin White, a lighting expert, will add the space's crowning glory: the candles. "It will be very beautiful," says White, "but the candlelight will also affect the rhythm of the play. Intervals were introduced into indoor plays so that candles could be removed or trimmed. The same will happen at the new theatre. And "hopefully" says White, "people will stay and watch." For Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe's artistic director, the theatre's educational potential is its real triumph. "Completing the theatre is another step of the journey, another important bit of the chronology, another big help in understanding Shakespeare and his theatre and his moment," he tells me. I have a feeling Mr Wanamaker would agree. Tickets for the first productions at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse go on sale on May 14; shakespearesglobe.com See more behind-the-scenes pictures from the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse