Chiara Atik “Poor Clare “, Orange Tree, Richmond

Poor Clare comes with a clutch of prizes and – more importantly really – was a finalist in the Susan Smith Blackburn awards for Anglophone women dramatists: a guarantee of quality. In welcome blasts of dialectical materialism, we’re treated to a work set in period dress and mores, skirted with pietistic codes and religious belief. Atik’s not ahistorical, and she counters that cod-middle English is as alien to Umbrian as 21^st century New York. And this is very New York. Atik’s right of course, and Italian has changed far less than the different Englishes out there. And it’s specifically New York, not transposed to UK.  Everyone in the cast speaks with an East Coast accent.

Arsema Thomas, star of Netflix’s hit Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte, makes more than an assured stage debut: she illumines all corners of this production like a radiance born of stained glass. Indeed there’s lancets of light in Oliver Fenwick’s design, either tightly-focused as at one startling moment at the end, or diffused. George Dennis’s sound discreetly hums: it’s a relatively quiet production. Eleanor Bull’s set is a thing of inlaid-pattern floor and a versatile use of benches, morphing into a bed or a church long abandoned to a few firewood pews. Bull’s costumes are sumptuously in-period and there should be some award too for Chris Smyth’s wigs and hair supervision. Thomas’ hair, both its dazzling adornment (though not its partial shearing) is realised with mesmerising zeal by maids Peppa (an indulgently amused Liz Kettle), and the younger Alma (Jacoba Williams, desperate to accept a gift but class-conflicted) who in themselves filter town goss and banter.

That’s alongside Clare’s sassy-cute sister Beatrice (in Anushka Chakravarti’s cheerful fashionista), who’d be an influencer if she had the tech; and mother Ortolana (Hermione Gulliford. Gulliford arrives late, but beyond poise and social advancement confesses in a fine scene her own brush with poverty in the Holy Land, and her visceral reaction to plenty again. In reality both Ortolana and Clare’s sister Catarino joined Clare in her voluntary order. Atik rightly clears this away to focus on Clare’s growing absorption into the life of the young man she meets. Not the much older one she’s meant to marry. Most of these parts are deftly if slightly underwritten. A seven-strong cast here seems a luxury a UK writer mightn’t dare. Or am I going all hairshirt?

Thomas dominates, alongside Freddy Carter as Francis. He’s impossibly preppy-pretty, even with the tonsure which Clare rightly suggests is a bit horrible (there’s a delicious moment when he suggests he might reduce it. No better declares Clare). The language Francis uses is pure Marxian anti-capitalism and Carter runs with this ina mix of button-holing and boyish appeal.

His Francis never hectors, his rage somehow gentles throughout just as Clare’s radicalised.  ”To have any amount of wealth! Means that you are on some level okay with people having less than you do.. … You have nice clothes because someone made them for less money than what you paid. You eat food because someone out there is tilling the land…” Atik and Francis don’t need to add starvation-labourers at Amazon, or what must be the sublimated Primark motto: ‘we work them harder so you don’t have to’.