The Stage: Catch This Play If You Can

"I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows/My friends forsake me like a memory lost/I am the self-consumer of my woes." John Clare, the peasant poet. We also have "You are the Sun, I am the Moon, play me." Neil Diamond. Not often, probably, that Diamond and Clare appear in the same breath but they do in Tony Ramsay's compelling new play for Eastern Angles which is touring eastern England this spring.

The Long Life and Good Fortune of John Clare is an investigation into the real John Clare who was born in Helpstone, Northamptonshire, in 1793 and who died in 1864. The play is a three-hander. Round a simple garden table we meet not only the 19th century John Clare, but also a contemporary psychiatric patient (who's into Neil Diamond) called John who thinks he's John Clare. If that synopsis sounds complicated, it is - but it makes for a very compelling, fascinating and dramatic evening in the theatre.

The performances are all superb. Richard Sandells is outstanding as the two Johns who find that life doesn't quite make sense for them. He deftly suggests the difference between madness then and madness now and how we approach those who see the world differently. Henry Devas plays Skrimshire, Clare's sympathetic physician and Rafe, TV writer/producer partner of Melody, contemporary John's psychiatrist. Both characters are sympathetically realised. Louise Mai Newberry is Clare's wife, Patty, psychiatrist Melody, a Victorian Grande Dame and a simple flowerseller. She catches the inner soul of all them.

Catch this play if you can.

Hugh Homan