Poor Clare

by Chiara Atik

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 7 August 2025

Blanche McIntyre directs Arsema Thomas as Clare, Freddy Carter as Francis, Anushka Chakravarti as Beatrice (Clare's sister). Hermione Gulliford as Ortolana (Clare's mother), Liz Kettle as Peppa and Jacoba Williams as Alma (servants in the household), and George Ormerod as a beggar in Chiara Atik's exploration of the career of St Clare of Assisi.

In a series of short scenes (managed with confidence and aplomb by ASMs in costumes as further servants in Clare's family household) we see Clare develop from being the typical product of a prosperous family with expectations of social standing and a marriage of convenience, to becoming a follower of the extraordinary path laid out by St Francis. 

Clare is sassy and opinionated, but completely sheltered from the the vicissitudes of life: when she and her sister are accosted by a beggar they scream in fright and run off as quickly as possible. It is only after encountering the newly scandalous Francis that she begins to rethink her priorities, though the lessons in absolute charity and renunciation of privilege are not easy to learn or to live out. Beatrice finds sharing a bed with a sister who has decided to wear a hair shirt profoundly uncomfortable; impulsive gifts to servants cause confusion in the household; attempts to run a 'clothing drive' for the poor are a bit ham-fisted. Clare is appalled that Francis will not act as a go-between to distribute the clothes she, her family and their friends have collected, and then she has to face the fact that well-meaning charity is not always well received by its recipients, because it may not be what they really need.

The play is written in an extremely modern idiom, though dressed in medieval costume. It's deliberately disorienting to hear modern expressions from the mouths of ladies in rich brocades or servant women in homespun, and even more so to have everyone speak in American accents - a deliberate nod to the playwright's origin, and a reminder that the issues facing Clare as a well-to-do person are still with us today: the play closes with an impassioned speech about moral responsibility in the modern world.

Clare's own progress towards her ultimate desire to break with her family and fully embrace Francis's doctrines seems like an exciting adventure in many ways; the growing friendship between the two has an easy familiarity once her initial bafflement subsides. Only at the very end of the play, when Clare asks to be tonsured and realises that Francis does not intend that they shall live in the same place - indeed that he intends to 'enclose' her, effectively sealing her off from the world in which he roams freely - does the full enormity of the step she is taking begin to sink in. We barely have time to register the shock of the disparity between what Francis imagines his male and his female followers are fit for, and there is no time to explore the further career of poor Clare as she becomes the founder of the Poor Clares.

In its own terms though, the play is fascinating, and the next stage of Clare's life is sensibly beyond its scope. Francis himself still seems to be finding his way as his boyish enthusiasms come up against stubborn reality, though he is adept at finding creative solutions (for example, appealing directly to the pope to forestall an unsympathetic local bishop) or in accepting from Clare some modifications to his grandiose plans for decorating a ruined chapel. His authoritative attitude to her future career seems like a harbinger from a different world, after his initial suggestions for what she might think about or do have been couched in rather more modern terms of giving hints rather than commands. 

The next chapter of their lives raises different issues for which the at times irreverent style of this play would hardly be suitable; the appeal to us to rethink our attitude to the poor among us would have been dulled by any attempt to grapple with the austere institution of an enclosed order of nuns.