Through role-play, children can dramatise situations, use their imaginations to pretend to be someone else and explore risky situations from the safety of the classroom. The benefits of role-playing are seeing new perspectives, supporting social skills through interactions with other children, increased confidence and empathy and helping children solve problems using their imagination! Every line of dialogue is important, and not a single part of the show feels out of place of unneeded. It’s so cleverly constructed, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a show where I loved the writing so much that I want to buy the fulls script so I can read it and annotate it to death. Emilia isn’t a frothy tale about a sexy woman who writes poetry. It is an emotional rollercoaster with Clare Perkin’s final speech worth the 2hours and 30-minute running time. Both my friend and I were in tears and other audience members seemed supportive that these words were being said. If you loved Nell Gwynn, you will love Emilia. years ago Emilia Bassano wanted her voice to be heard. It wasn’t. Could she have been the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets? What of her own poems? Why was her story erased from history? In a four-star review for LondonTheatre.co.uk, Mark Shenton said: "This is a play that speaks to today, as a woman finds her own story and the voice to tell it with. As fiercely embodied by not one but three actors - Saffron Coomber, Adelle Leonce and Clare Perkins - she comes alive with passion and conviction." Emiliais nominated for three Olivier Awards, including Best Entertainment or Comedy Play.

I wanted the play to be suppler, and to show rather than tell. Even speeches that hit the mark in both centuries – as when Lloyd Malcolm skewers the exoticisation of women of colour, or writes so beautifully about the cost of becoming a mother to women’s sense of self – are often proclaimed rather than embodied.

Another key concept in the Reggio Emilia Approach is the importance of the learning environment, known as the “Environment as the Third Teacher”. In this approach, activities must take place in an environment that suits learners’ interests and stages of development. Make sure that your environment is filled with materials that will promote creativity, thinking, problem-solving, questions, exploration and experimentation, and open-ended play. Under Petra Kalive’s direction, the play charts Emilia’s passage into the gentry class: when she was given away at the age of seven to Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent, after the death of her father; and her schooling in the etiquette of being a woman of a higher social standing, communicated in a highly entertaining dance sequence featuring Sonya Suares, Jing-Xuan Chan and Sarah Fitzgerald as noblewomen. In a funny little nod to the unhistorical casting, Suares performs moves synonymous with Bharatanatyam, an ancient Indian classical dance.

The Reggio Emilia Approach assumes that children form their unique personalities throughout early development. A key idea is that young children possess “a hundred languages”, which they can use to express themselves and their ideas. The approach seeks to support children to use these symbolic languages to communicate and learn. These languages are the tools that children use to learn, such as talking, thinking, exploring and creating.Emilia is silly, it’s fun, and it’s completely unsubtle, but the most important word I can think of to describe this show is powerful . It’s about the importance of friendship, strength in numbers, and the power of female ingenuity. Transferring from the Globe, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play about the seventeenth-century poet Emilia Bassano Lanier has already been widely heralded as ‘rousing’– and it certainly is that. It rouses the audience right to their feet. They whoop and cheer the barnstorming feminist speeches, and literally boo the bad oppressive men. Celebrate women’s voices through the story of this trailblazing, forgotten woman. Stand up and be counted. Emilia and her sisters reach out to us across the centuries with passion, fury, laughter and song. Listen to them. Let them inspire and unite us. There are three teachers of children: adults, other children, and their physical environment.” - Loris Malaguzzi