July 17, 2025 · 6:06 pm
MEDIEVAL MODERNITY
There’s a pleasant irony in opening, this week, a story of an aristocratically bred heiress, seized first by evangelical Christian religion after which by a charismatic man, rejecting all of it to stay in excessive poverty rejecting society. Irony anyway in a time of Gen Z idealistic disgust with the best way the world runs. Though the 13c St Clare of Assisi, good 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 well timed in its sense of reckless youthful willpower. And within the remaining scene, touching is her kneeling, nunly plea by no means to be blinded to poverty and to discover a strategy to “be good”.
Atik’s full of life textual content and Blanche McIntyre’s course supply us – in medieval costume however teenage American language and slang and refernces to all the things from goFundme to lip-salve , at the same time as they focus on good friend Guido “back from the crusades” as if it was a niche yah, which I suppose it generally was.
Its a deliberate double imaginative and prescient, and Arsema Thomas from Netflix provides a terrific stage debut as Clare, full of life and rebellious, larking together with her sister, arguing together with her Mum, regularly intrigued by Freddie Carter’s earnest Francis who tells her that to be wealthy is “to be complicit in inequality”, and challenges her to confront the deep poverty of households beneath the Pontevecchio bridge. Her understanding grows, alongside revulsion on the wedding ceremony presents and gown ready for her. The extremity of her rejection turns into virtually startling: after toying with the argument her sister favours that there must be a center approach, past the hair shirt and sleeping on the ground as a result of hundreds should. “Thousands” says the affordable Beatrice “do not sleep on the floor alongside a bed”.
It is a fairly sharp 105 straight minutes, although we’re too conscious from early on that there may be just one ending, and the arguments after all are perennial. What’s lacking although, regardless of discuss of Pope, interfering bishop, and many others is God. Francis and Clare in actual historical past spoke not as if pushed not by purely trendy liberal socialism , however by an concept of God and his world and work. There is little surprise on this Francis: no greeting of brother wind and brother solar and the beasts round. He units up his creche with actual straw – traditionally he’s the daddy of all Christmas crib scenes – however it’s the poverty that fascinates him about it, not the incarnate godhead. So it might virtually be an trustworthy trendy left-leaning fiction, for all the women’ robes and maids (Liz Kettle and Jacoba Williams, properly drawn). Fine, however given the actual figures and actual robes, it might have performed on extra notes…
orangetreetheatre.co.uk to 9 aug
ranking 3
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