Theatre review: Emilia

Like most new Artistic Directors, Michelle Terry's had a mixed first season in charge of the Globe, but one area that for me has seemed an unqualified success has been her approach to gender parity in casting. Although she's stuck to her predecessor's target of 50/50 casting, Terry has amended this to be across an entire season rather than on a production-by-production basis, so directors of individual shows don't feel too restricted by it. One way to make sure a lot of classics dominated by men can be balanced out is by having one production cast entirely with women, and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's specially-commissioned Emilia is no random choice to get this treatment: The story of a possible muse of Shakespeare's bubbles over with anger at the absence of women from Jacobethan theatre, so the way Nicole Charles's production flips the era's all-male casting doesn't feel like meeting a quota, but like an essential part of the play's reclaiming of women's voices.

Theatre review: Seminar

The publicity image for Seminar shows Roger Allam throwing sheets of papers into the air, leading some people I know to be disappointed when more cast were announced, as they'd been hoping for two hours of Allam throwing paper around. Personally I was glad - after all, he needs someone to chuck the paper at. Of course, the throwing is (mostly) metaphorical, as Theresa Rebeck's play is about the ambitions, pretensions and easily bruised egos of aspiring writers. Allam plays Leonard, at one time a respected novelist, but nowadays better known as a talented and influential editor of other people's work. As a nice little earner on the side he holds exclusive writing courses, tearing into the efforts of the most promising new writers who can afford him - or go into debt to get him. Martin (Bryan Dick,) Douglas (Oliver Hembrough,) Izzy (Rebecca Grant) and Kate (Charity Wakefield,) whose vast flat they meet in, are in for the 10-week course.

Theatre review: The Blackest Black

Abi (Charity Wakefield) is an English artist who's managed to get sponsorship to spend time at an observatory in the middle of the Arizona desert, to create artworks inspired by the exploration of space. Even before we meet him, we can tell from the way Abi huffs about the arrogance of the "spaceman" that she has feelings for him, and when astronomer Martin (John Light) does appear it's quickly made clear that the two have been sleeping together. As Martin settles in for a night of observations crucial to his research, Abi tries to force the married scientist to engage with her world-view, while he resolutely plays his cards close to his chest. As these two big personalities clash, the timid technician Chuck (Ian Bonar) gets caught up in the middle of their drama, with potentially tragic consequences.