MEDIEVAL MODERNITY
There’s a nice irony in opening, this week, a tale of an aristocratically bred heiress, seized first by evangelical Christian faith and then by a charismatic man, rejecting it all to live in extreme poverty rejecting society. Irony anyway in a time of Gen Z idealistic disgust with the way the world runs. Though the 13c St Clare of Assisi, friend of St Francis and foundress of the barefoot Poor Clares order of nuns, turned neither to criminality nor to politics, Chiara Atik’s play feels timely in its sense of reckless youthful determination. And in the final scene, touching is her kneeling, nunly plea never to be blinded to poverty and to find a way to “be good”.
Atik’s lively text and Blanche McIntyre’s direction offer us – in medieval costume but teenage American language and slang and refernces to everything from goFundme to lip-salve , even as they discuss friend Guido “back from the crusades” as if it was a gap yah, which I suppose it sometimes was.
Its a deliberate double vision, and Arsema Thomas from Netflix offers a terrific stage debut as Clare, lively and rebellious, larking with her sister, arguing with her Mum, gradually intrigued by Freddie Carter’s earnest Francis who tells her that to be rich is “to be complicit in inequality”, and challenges her to confront the deep poverty of families under the Pontevecchio bridge. Her understanding grows, alongside revulsion at the wedding gifts and dress prepared for her. The extremity of her rejection becomes almost startling: after toying with the argument her sister favours that there has to be a middle way, beyond the hair shirt and sleeping on the floor because thousands have to. “Thousands” says the reasonable Beatrice “do not sleep on the floor alongside a bed”.
It is a quite sharp 105 straight minutes, though we are too aware from early on that there can be only one ending, and the arguments of course are perennial. What’s missing though, despite talk of Pope, interfering bishop, etc is God. Francis and Clare in real history spoke not as if driven not by purely modern liberal socialism , but by an idea of God and his world and work. There is little wonder in this Francis: no greeting of brother wind and brother sun and the beasts around. He sets up his creche with real straw – historically he is the father of all Christmas crib scenes – but it’s the poverty that fascinates him about it, not the incarnate godhead. So it could almost be an honest modern left-leaning fiction, for all the ladies’ gowns and maids (Liz Kettle and Jacoba Williams, nicely drawn). Fine, but given the real figures and real gowns, it could have played on more notes…
orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 9 aug
rating 3
theatreCat 