joue le genre’s one-woman show pitches to us that Shakespeare wrote no decent roles for women. But to make matters worse, theatre institutions – from the powerhouses in the West End to our local secondary school productions – still fail to consider gender-blind casting. Co-writer and performer Emma Bentley is telling us her own story. Only partly fictionalised, she tells us.

We start in 2006. Emma is the best actor in school: “everyone says so”. She’s the teacher’s favourite and auditions to play the Prince of Denmark himself. While not certain how to deliver the “to be or not to be” speech, though she understands everything about it, she still gets a standing ovation from the assembled students… and is cast as Ophelia. Her teacher just couldn’t buy into a female Hamlet.

Right from the off it’s a very positive performance. Bentley is funny, vibrant and energetic, snapping between characters little and large throughout. The audience is sometimes offputtingly familiar (they laugh immediately at an impression of a particular drama school lecturer, which I gather was quite accurate). But the laughs don’t wash over her: she cuts in, ploughing on with her material at pace. This is the sort of person who could sell Shakespeare to any classroom of hormonal teenagers, and her point about women in theatre to the weariest of midweek audiences.

There are sections that feel irrelevant at the time. At times we stray too specifically into Emma’s life outside of the theatre, for example when she is rebuffed by a classmate and previous fling in a club. But 45 minutes in, it becomes clear where all these vignettes are leading – like an overly-long joke with a short punchy punchline.

And what a punchline. Excerpts from interviews with women in the industry give a cubist portrait of the condition of women in a twenty-first century theatre industry. We leave this fascinating moment all too quickly without comment for an audition at a major theatre and a paltry role: Bianca in Othello. But as Emma throws the handkerchief back at Cassio, shards of those barbs from her past slice into the soliloquy. All of a sudden she has slipped back into the speech of all speeches, and the fit is skin-tight. Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” transpose perfectly to our glass ceiling. “And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” rings out in a different note, but just as sombrely true as ever. So it turns out Old Will wrote pretty well for women after all.

To She or Not to She played at the Lyric Hammersmith as part of the Evolution Festival. For more information, see the Lyric Hammersmith website.