EMILIA (Globe Theatre/Vaudeville Theatre)***

 

By Sophie

Link: https://www.emilialive.com

Available until: 2^nd December 2020

Emilia has been widely revered as one of the great plays of the modern age and there are certainly many good things in it. It’s the story of a fascinating woman, brought to the stage by a very interesting and multi-talented playwright and performed by a very strong team of actors and creatives who all happen to be female.

But my feelings are very mixed.

I don’t really like plays that set out to be feminist. I would rather see people telling stories in an interesting way and make my own judgements from watching them. I felt that, in Emilia, I was being told what to feel.

The human beings I admire are the ones who go out and achieve what they want to achieve. Emilia Bassano, the woman who is the subject of the play – believed to have been the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets – would probably be one such as she undoubtedly achieved a lot in the face of significant adversity. Yet the woman presented in this play doesn’t particularly excite my admiration.

There is a moment when Emilia attends a play and becomes angry with the playwright. I won’t say why, though her anger is understandable, but it seems very unfair on the actors onstage. The audience’s reaction suggests that Emilia is doing something extremely funny and very worthy, but all I could think was what a horrible moment it must be for the actors (though perhaps it was more acceptable in Shakespeare’s time).

Then there’s the humour. The humour in Emilia is mostly based around shouting, swearing and lapses into modern English. All these things can be very entertaining. But the humour is very much on the surface and Emilia doesn’t seem to be sure whether it’s giving us an insight into a fascinating woman or giving us all a good laugh at the expense of men. It probably weakens the important points the play is trying to make if we’re spending much of the time laughing. There can be profound truths in comedy, but only if we stop laughing long enough to think about it.

Act 2 is more satisfactory than Act 1 as it focuses more on the difficulties in Emilia’s situation and less on the humour and I think it did give me a new perspective about sexism which I haven’t really considered before. I have not really experienced sexism myself (at least, not from men), perhaps because everyone has already realised I’m disabled so I’m automatically inferior before they even think about my gender. But this play suggests that being a woman was seen as a sort of disability and that’s an intriguing idea.

I might have reservations about the way in which Morgan Lloyd Malcolm has written this play, but that isn’t to say I think she’s a bad playwright. There’s no doubt about her ability to use language. She can be hilarious. She can also write beautiful, moving speeches. We get to see both in Emilia. But it does seem sometimes as though she is trying to write two plays at once and even Shakespeare struggled with that. We never did find out what happened to Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew.

There is a lot of shouting and declaiming of the text, which would have been fine if it had seemed motivated by true emotion, but it seems to be more about making a noise than making a point. This seems a particular shame when I would imagine a lot of women who spoke loudly were simply dismissed as making a noise, even when they had something of real substance to say.

There are also some absolutely stunning speeches which were beautifully-delivered, but from looking at the script, it seems a lot of moments which had the potential to be really powerful were lost because they were delivered loudly rather than meaningfully.

Three performers play the role of Emilia. Saffron Coombs plays Emilia 1, the youngest Emilia. She is childlike and sweet to begin with and she does well with showing Emilia’s psychological transition into adulthood. Adelle Leonce is the slightly older Emilia 2, and Clare Perkins plays the protective Emilia 3, who acts as a sort of narrator throughout the play (occasionally supported by the other Emilias), as well as taking over in the main role for the final section of the play. They are an ideal trio for the Emilia roles as their acting styles are similar and they are believably the same person; there is no suspension of disbelief required. They are all good at comedy, though it’s in the serious moments when they address the audience that their words are most deeply felt.

There are also some lovely moments from the rest of the cast, all of whom take on multiple roles. Nadia Albina is touching as Lady Katherine. Jackie Clune is highly amusing as Lady Helena and provides some of the play’s saddest moments as Eve. Carolyn Pickles offers impressive characterisation in all her roles, even if she doesn’t have the opportunity to give her characters depth. The women also take the roles of men and although they do tend to be caricatures, there’s a very interesting William Shakespeare from Charity Wakefield, and Emilia’s husband, Alphonso Lanier, is cleverly played by Amanda Wilkin.

It’s not a bad play at all, but one problem with enthusiastic and universal praise of a play is that expectations can sometimes be unrealistically high – and that can lead to disappointment.