During the first Stratford Festival in 1953, a young Timothy Findley received impromptu acting lessons from Alec Guinness. He later worked with Thornton Wilder, who urged him to write a play of his own. Findley’s first effort was about a group of actors locked in a theatre with God. “Overwritten, over-serious … over-everything” is how he described it years later.

In a sense, Elizabeth Rex, Findley’s latest play – featured in this year’s Stratford Festival – comes full circle. It cleverly combines Findley’s love of acting with his remarkable craft as a writer of great emotional power. And there’s no “over-” anything in this outstanding theatrical work.

The year is 1601 and The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting troupe under the guidance of Shakespeare himself, have been dragooned into performing. This time, Findley’s actors are trapped in a barn rather than a theatre, and it’s not God but Queen Elizabeth I who keeps them there. She wants something to take her mind off the rebel she has condemned to death, whose execution is imminent. That man is her lover, the Earl of Essex.

As in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Shakespeare’s words are seamlessly folded into authentic-sounding dialogue. In this case, the play-within-the-play is Much Ado About Nothing. As the troupe prepares, the queen receives a lesson in femininity from actor Ned Lowenscroft, whose career has been built on his ability to deceive his audiences. In turn, Ned learns something from her power and aggression. All the while, Shakespeare watches with conflicted feelings.

Findley has filled this play about the past with contemporary resonance. It celebrates the power of words and acting to evoke memory while provoking new thought. He presents actors, writers, their craft, their passionately chaotic lives together, and their strangely ambivalent relationships with their audiences – they depend on them, but also challenge them as much as they dare. And this play is full of daring: one of the most poignant characters is a bear that sometimes forgets he has been freed from the baiting pit. Elizabeth Rex is a play to savour.