Latest news with #BlancheMcIntyre
Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Poor Clare review — a Bridgerton star turns a saint into a Valley girl
The American writer Chiara Atik's award-winning drama about Clare of Assisi has something of the tongue-in-cheek energy of a Saturday Night Live skit. Here's the idea: Clare may be a 13th-century noblewoman but her speech and thoughts are those of a Valley girl in a high school comedy. Like, totally. The best jokes land well in Blanche McIntyre's production at the Orange Tree, that in-the-round venue where, if you sit in the front row, you're only inches from the actors. Arsema Thomas, one of the stars of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story makes an assured stage debut in the title role. When she swaps her sumptuous gown (full marks to the designer, Eleanor Bull) for the kind of simple garment worn by her mentor Francis, there's no mistaking her idealism.
The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poor Clare review – sassy spin on a medieval saint asks pithy questions
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. At Orange Tree theatre, London, until 9 August
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Letters from Max review – rich reflections on life, death and nothingness from a poet who died at 25
Sarah Ruhl first knew Max Ritvo as a student of her playwriting class at Yale. He was a 20-year-old poet who had lived through paediatric cancer, Ewing's sarcoma. The cancer came back and he died five years later but in that time Ruhl and Ritvo wrote letters to each other with thoughts on life, death, God, faith and nothingness. That became the basis of a book published in 2018, two years after Ritvo's death. Now adapted for the stage, they form a kind of modern-day Aristotelian dialogue, written by Ruhl (who previously wrote the epistolary play, Dear Elizabeth). Under the direction of Blanche McIntyre, Max (Eric Sirakian) and Sarah (Sirine Saba) variously become teacher and student for each other, and of life rather than merely playwriting. They walk past or around each other, not touching but sometimes in close proximity. The intimacies are in their words. It is an aural experience above all else. You see the beauty and richness of these words and thoughts on the page. Rather than becoming emotionally devastating, it is a contained and cerebral piece. The poise has grace – but also emotional distance. Dick Bird's set design manifests the spiritual idea of looking through a glass darkly; there is a mirrored screen in the middle of the stage and the traverse seating arrangement sets up the same division. Sometimes, you see two versions of Max – the real and the mirror reflection. It builds visual metaphors on the abstruseness of life and death, albeit rather effortfully. Saba is a compelling and solid presence on stage, deliberately holding back emotion as Max slides further into serious illness. Sirakian is initially playful and already slightly other-worldly. The programme tells us that Sirakian knew Ritvo at Yale – he was a fellow student in Ruhl's class – which gives his performance an added layer. Stunning cello accompaniment, composed by Laura Moody, acquires its own voice amid the spoken dialogue. There is a magnificent solo recreation of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, and a thrillingly atmospheric sequence of rainfall tapped on the wood of the cello to accompany a poem about rain. While it certainly captures a sense of expressing the ineffable on stage, you do not get the mess of Ritvo's emotions and his closest relationships (he suddenly announced that he is getting married out of the blue). There is something rather curated in this withholding. In a race against death, he is in a rush to get his poetry out, rather like John Keats in the face of TB (who also died at 25). You hear he is scared, as one strand of thought, and that he's bitter, as another, but the play quickly returns to its intellectual topics, as if ballast against dangerously uncontained emotion. There is a singular moment of eruption, when he shouts 'I DON'T HAVE TIME' and this stands out. It is startling, angry, real and felt. At Hampstead theatre, London, until 28 June
