Ohmigod you guys – Chiara Atik’s award-winning but glib 2022 play uses idiomatic modern American dialogue to tell the story of St Clare, a wealthy 13th-century noblewoman who joined St Francis of Assisi in a life of poverty and piety. This juxtaposition of historic and contemporary, familiar from the likes of The Favourite and The Great, is more stark here as the theme is not power and sex but wealth inequality.
Blanche McIntyre’s production plays up to the wit of Atik’s writing and features a poised and confident stage debut from Arsema Thomas, whose “super-cute” Valley Girl Clare is slowly radicalised. But the hand-wringing parallels drawn between unfairness in the Middle Ages and the present day become laboured.
