Chiara Atik’s play about Saint Clare of Assisi and her friendship with the often more celebrated Saint Francis takes its lead from the Netflix school of sassy history. The cast have American accents and could be high-schoolers clicking their fingers, despite the period dress. The drama archly positions club-land beats and contemporary phraseology (“cool”, “totally” “my social anxiety …”) alongside choral sounds and medieval monasticism. It is light on historical detail, heavy on humour and attitude.
So it makes sense to cast two Netflix stars in this very modern spin on the Italian saints: Clare is played by Arsema Thomas, known for her TV role in Queen Charlotte (the Bridgerton spin-off) while Shadow and Bone actor, Freddy Carter, is the priggishly earnest Francis.
Atik’s play, which won multiple awards in America, dramatises the conversion of Clare, an Italian noblewoman inspired by her friendship with Francis of Assisi to found an order following a rule of strict poverty. Here she is as kick-ass as they come, with an immaculate stage debut from Thomas, who plays the part straight up and sharp, despite the eyebrow-raised wit of the enterprise.
But beneath the surface glibness there is lean, clever writing with short, sharp scenes and clean direction by Blanche McIntyre as the play travels towards its serious preoccupations with wealth, poverty and inequality.
Clare, with her order of Poor Ladies, was anything but poor at the outset. She renounced all her wealth after meeting Francis and embraced radical poverty (her order, until recently, were still instructed to walk barefoot). Francis, meanwhile, is mocked, gently, as a young man rebelling against his silk merchant father. He slowly becomes more moderate, it seems, and Clare all the more radical.
The unfussy, single statement set (a bed, a chair, a bare tiled floor) is designed by Eleanor Bull, who also dreams up some gorgeously regal period costumes. It is suffused in warm, pointed light by Oliver Fenwick.
There are some great scenes of bristling sisterhood between Clare and younger sis, Beatrice (Anushka Chakravarti, cutely brattish), as well as gossiping sessions between Clare and her two lady’s maids (Liz Kettle and Jacoba Williams).
“Can you spare any change, please?” says a beggar who Clare and Beatrice mistake for a heap of rubbish. This hammers home the fact that this is both about 13th-century poverty and our own. But there is potency in the heavy-handedness: the play is not trying to hide the fact that inequality then is recognisable, and unchanged, today.
There are intelligent conversations about it that resonates loudly for today – Francis speaks of how the rich must necessarily turn a blind eye to poverty because it implicates them, by its existence.
The ending speaks of the modern world and all the ways in which the gulf between rich and poor is shored up. It should jar but instead leaves you prickled, roused, impressed by the singularity of Clare’s resolve – and awkwardly implicated yourself.
