Theatre / “Emilia,” by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. At The Playhouse, until December 3. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

EMILIA Bassano Lanier has long fascinated Shakespeare-watchers and feminists alike as the most likely of four candidates to the title of the “Dark Lady” in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Indeed, in 2017, Canberra writer Paul Kauffman presented his own version of the play, “Shakespeare’s Mistress”, at the ANU School of Music.

The real-life Emilia, a highly educated Englishwoman born to a Venetian musician and his English wife, rose to fame as the author of a published book of poems, who because of her reputed relationship with The Bard and her absence from the poetry anthologies, has become a byword for women written out of literary history.

Depicted throughout as “a clever woman”, she may, the play hints, have shared composition of the sonnets with Shakespeare and gave him some of his best ideas.

This eccentric production directed by Petra Kalive, for Essential Theatre, uses vaudeville as the way into representing English playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s script in an Australian manner.

With a triple casting of Emilia as young, (Manali Datar) midcareer (Cessalee Stovall) and elderly (Lisa Maza), the three Emilias act as a kind of chorus throughout.

In this production, which involves no male actors, a diverse cast of 13 act out a chronological sequence covering Emilia’s early relationship with and pregnancy by the much older patron of Shakespeare’s company, Lord Henry Carey (Genevieve Picot), her hastily arranged marriage to her cousin Alfonso Lanier (Catherine Glavicic), a second birth, possibly to Shakespeare (Heidi Arena), her abandonment of high society to join common women as a poet and teacher and, finally, her triumph as a published poet, though one destined to be consigned to the vault of history.

It’s an angry, witty play, written in a daring mix of Elizabethan English and contemporary expletives

Avowedly Brechtian in approach, the casting of female and non-binary actors never jars and, in the parts of the foppish Adolphus and corpulent Shakespeare, adds a nice touch of absurdity that supports the playwright’s contention that men are pretty much a waste of space.

In the first part of the play, it helps to know your Shakespeare, partly explaining the departure of several rows from the  audience at interval.

At one stage, for instance, Heidi Arena as Shakespeare quotes from the sonnet. Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and gets a serve— “that’s racist”— from Emilia, who follows with her own quote from Juliet, “When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars”.

In another scene, there are lines snatched from “King Lear” – Cordelia’s “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth” and Lear’s “Nothing will come of nothing.”

And in a key scene preceded by the “Willow Song,” Glavicic performs Emilia’s famous feminist speech (the name coincidence of the name is noted) from Act IV of “Othello”.

Chronological as it may be, this not a history play. As Emilia leaves the claustrophobic confines of the London literary circle, the casting changes from Datar to Stovall, in whose hands there are hints of tragedy. Here she crosses to the South Bank of the Thames, where she meets working-class women, then takes refuge with the broadminded Lady Margaret Clifford, sensitively performed by Emma J Hawkins, develops her writing craft and is brazenly confronted by an aristocratic male critic.

When Emilia returns to London, it is to publish her work and Maza picks up the role. There is a momentary triumph then increasing frustration as she realises that the very active publication is going to endanger women.

Emilia 3 has a brief encounter with Shakespeare, who gives himself a pat on the back and then after several twists and apparent false endings, the evening concludes in a ferocious address to the audience by Maza, who whips the crowd into a frenzy of agreement that women have long been sidelined.

There is a great deal of cleverness in this play and this production, but in the end I was left wondering whether it had to be quite so preachy.