The actors – all of them women or non-binary – suffuse these early scenes in and around the Elizabethan court with comic disdain. Supported by Xanthe Beesley’s choreography (one of several facets of Emilia that evoke Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), this seems like a play about to take flight. That it fails to do so is due less to the misfortune behind Shakespeare’s limping exit than to his presence in the script in the first place.

It becomes apparent that Shakespeare’s hobbling from the stage is not deliberate when, after a brief but awkward silence, two of the more seasoned actors in the sixteen-strong company (Amanda LeBonté and Genevieve Picot) step downstage and begin to extemporise. A few words into their patter, the company is called off-stage and the house lights come up. A little over half an hour later, Shakespeare1 (I’ll borrow the nomenclature that Malcolm uses in her script to differentiate the three actors who take on the role of Emilia) is on his/her way to hospital and the play resumes. Shakespeare2 emerges, script in hand, more the Shakespeare of Shakespeare in Love than that of Upstart Crow, a man not only younger and more dignified than his predecessor, but one with a keener sense of his own genius.

At this point, a reviewer starts to wonder whether it’s fair to offer any sort of critique of a play that has proceeded under such circumstances; whether it isn’t preferable to return when the play might be performed as the director (Petra Kalive) intended. Two reasons underpin my decision to review the performance as planned.Cessalee Stovall as Emilia (photography Dylan Hornsby)

The first reason, quite simply, is the chance to laud the remarkable agility and poise of the entire ensemble as they managed the disruption, and to single out Izabella Yena, who jumped into the role of Shakespeare. Along with the entire cast, she milked the turmoil for laughs (suddenly we were in our own version of The Play That Goes Wrong), owning the fact that she very occasionally needed to refer to the script. It would have been a notable performance had Yena been rehearsing the part from day one. At less than half an hour’s notice, it was exceptional.

The second reason is that Emilia’s opening night provides a stark reminder of everything that is exciting and unique about theatre as an artform – its unpredictability, its dangers, its miracles. Every performance sits on a fine line between triumph and disaster, and as the lights go down it is impossible to know whether we will witness something prosaic, something brilliant, or something that sits frustratingly between. No performance is the same. No audience is the same. What one audience member experiences can never be the same as the experience of the person sitting next to them.

Theatre is art at is most ephemeral, and it’s in theatre’s very ephemerality that its value lies. Change one element and the entire composition changes. Give even one line of text a different intonation and the meaning of the whole begins to shift. We can only speculate about the degree to which the injury to Shakespeare1 altered Emilia from the version presented the night before. Perhaps the effect was subtle, perhaps it was comprehensive. What is clear is that, just as an unexpected change of actor will change the tenor of a play (it’s difficult to see how the doltish Shakespeare1 would have brought to the love scenes between Shakespeare and Emilia the same emotional intensity that Shakespeare2 evoked), so too Shakespeare’s conspicuous presence in this explication of Emilia Bassano’s life must alter the way we understand her story.

Who then is the historical Emilia Bassano? As is the case with Shakespeare himself, what remains of her in the historical record is sketchy. With her Venetian father and English mother, she lived on the fringes of the Elizabethan court. When her father died, Emilia, still just a child, was ‘adopted’ by the countess of Kent, who saw to her education in art, philosophy and poetry. In her late teens, Emilia became the mistress of Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain, a man in his sixties. Theirs was a contented relationship, but when Emilia fell pregnant to Carey he arranged a marriage to her distant cousin Alphonso Lanier, who, like her father, was a musician at court. With the support of several female patrons, Emilia eventually published a book of poetry, the first woman in England to do so.

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail Christ King of the Jews, 1611) narrated the story of Christ from the perspective of women such as Eve and Pilate’s wife. Whether Emilia was a religious poet in the style of John Milton, or the writer of a proto-feminist work, is one of several points of contention in the critical discourse concerning her life and work. Rediscovered by scholars in the late twentieth century, Emilia has been identified by some as the ‘Dark Lady’ about whom Shakespeare wrote in his sonnets. Others argue, without substantive evidence, that she was Shakespeare himself.Nicholas Hilliard miniature of Emilia Lanier, dated 1593 (Wikicommons)

In Emilia, Malcolm takes these theories and runs with them. Her aim, she writes in notes to the play, is to use Emilia’s story to amplify all those marginalised voices lost to history. Her decision to literalise the idea of the ‘dark lady’ by characterising Emilia as a Moor whose father was effectively a refugee broadens these lost voices to those silenced not only because of their gender but also because of their race.

The problem, however, is that Malcolm claims Emilia’s place in history not through a celebration of Emilia’s own words (we get minimal insight into Emilia’s writing) but through her relationship with Shakespeare. She is, in Malcolm’s telling, Shakespeare’s discarded muse, their whispered pillow-talk finding its way into his sonnets. More contentiously, Emilia is here ascribed as the source of his better poetry and dialogue, the appearance in Othello of a character named Emilia apparently sufficient evidence of Shakespeare’s pilfering.

Despite the play’s visceral anger, there is something almost orthodox about its entreaties. Emilia feels more like a piece of 1970s feminist agitprop than a contemporary play (it was first performed at London’s Globe in 2018). Watching it, you can’t help but wonder whether there isn’t something more original to be said about the silencing of non-conformist voices. Reflexively exhorting a specious sisterhood to ‘burn the whole fucking house down’ while standing on stage at the Melbourne Arts Centre (within a theatre ecology where, arguably, a new-on-the-scene Shakespeare might struggle to get his work staged because he fails to tick sufficient diversity boxes) doesn’t seem such a radical declamation.

If the ruminative elements of the play tend to lack force – only Picot as Carey and Cessalee Stovall as Emilia2 seem entirely comfortable with the play’s more earnest passages – what enlivens Emilia is the joyous energy of its actors and the nimbleness of their comic timing. Emilia never fails to be visually interesting, its colour palette (designed by Zoë Rouse, Emily Collett, and Katie Sfetkidis) keeping the eye engaged, even when the action drags.

Emma J Hawkin’s wrings every ounce of comedy and pathos from her role as Lady Margaret Clifford, one of Emilia’s patrons, and Sophie Lampel’s Lord Thomas Howard keenly demonstrates how quickly a simpering fool can turn monstrous when their status is threatened. Catherine Glavicic also shines as Alphonso, deftly negotiating his transition from clown to a man worthy of admiration and pity.

In an article responding to the most recent series of The Crown, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins wrote: ‘depicting famous people on screen lends a plausibility to any plot, however weak. It titillates the audience with familiarity.’ Jenkins might have been writing about Malcolm’s depiction of Shakespeare. Not only does Shakespeare’s presence bring an air of plausibility to the Emilia Bassano that Malcolm has constructed here, it heightens the insult on which the play feeds – that for four centuries Shakespeare has been celebrated as the ‘greatest writer in the English language’ while Emilia Bassano has all but disappeared.

Had this been a play about Shakespeare, the scenes between Shakespeare and Emilia might have offered an amusing, even subversive, take on his life and work. But Emilia is not a play about Shakespeare: it’s about Emilia Bassano. To give her life its worth and meaning through the extensive and spurious use of Shakespeare’s words – as Morgan Lloyd Malcolm does here – might be read as the suppression of Emilia Bassano’s voice by other means.

Emilia (Essential Theatre) is being performed at the Arts Centre Melbourne and Geelong Arts Centre until November 27. Performance attended: 11 November.