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.
