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Theatre review: Emilia

Emilia Bassano, long thought to be Shakespeare's muse, was an Italian Jew. But you wouldn't know it from this play about her

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At the end of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play about the poet Emilia Bassano, who is thought to be a lover of Shakespeare’s and the “Dark Lady” of his sonnets, it is revealed that she was probably an Italian Jew.

It comes as a surprise because in Nicole Charles’s lively, playful, all-female Shakespeare’s Globe production, in which the men of the time are portrayed by the female cast with the ridicule that their chauvinism deserves, Emilia is played at three stages of her life by Saffron Coomber, Adele Leonce and Clare Perkins as someone who identifies as modern, black British of presumably Afro Caribbean descent.

For a play that proudly professes to revive the reputation of a forgotten talent, whose very spoken words may have ended up in Shakespeare’s plays and whose writings were suppressed by men because of her gender, you wonder if the real Emilia would appreciate being depicted as something she was not.

Still this show is driven by energy and anger about the misogyny that prevented this woman’s voice from being heard. And as a way of addressing modern gender politics and today’s Brexit-informed racism, it serves as a clarion call to arms.

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