Review - The Times : Four Stars

The title of Tony Ramsay’s play for Eastern Angles startles at first, because the peasant-poet had it tough. Born in 1793, at 7 he was a ploughboy, later a gardener and lime-burner. He had nine children, lost two in infancy and two as adults; suffered profound depression and spent the last 27 years of his life in asylums, once absconding to walk 80 miles home and eat grass at the roadside.

The contrast between his low status and the brilliance of his poems about land and loss has made Clare a focus of trite social indignation. In The Fool Edward Bond portrayed him as the exploited worker and a modern character in this play sums him up as “shafted by publishers and everyone else, ended up mad as a bag of spanners”. But this intriguing work overthrows it by focusing not on society, but on creativity and depression.

Clare was not in fact persecuted: he was lionised, published, given a cottage and financial support by his patron Lord Milton. In his dissolution he got the best medical care of the age, not strait-jackets and Bedlam. The play, with three fine actors deftly switching period and character under director Ivan Cutting, tells the story through a modern psychiatric patient claiming to be Clare. Richard Sandells is superb as patient and poet, one moment shuddering in painful delusion, the next becoming, in accent and demeanour, the troubled poet.

Louise Mai Newberry, with unfussy costume adjustments, is both modern psychiatrist and Clare’s long-suffering wife. In a sub-plot (maybe too neat) the psychiatrist argues with her husband (Henry Devas), a failing documentary-maker who is pitching the old line on Clare to Channel 4. With a nice dry, contemporary wit, he observes that his idea about travellers was binned because “Dale Farm and big fat weddings had used up their gypsy quota”. He tries again for their Valentine’s Day theme.

It is a finer play than its regional small-space tour might suggest; in concept, language and performance it honours poetry and pain alike. When Sandells finally speaks the lines “I am, yet what I am none cares or knows . . .” you catch your breath. And few things ring sadder and more profoundly than the psychiatrist’s conclusion: “It was if he was born with a sense of loss, and spent the rest of his life searching.”

Libby Purves