Clare’s Walk is the latest production by Steve Waters, Director of Studies in Drama at Homerton College, Cambridge. In the words of the Menagerie Theatre’s web page:
“Clare’s Walk takes for its inspiration the nightmarish journey of 1841 by poet John Clare (1793-1864) from the lunatic asylum where he was incarcerated in Epping Forest to his home in Northborough in North Cambridgeshire, along the route of the A1.The production has been appearing in small venues along the route Clare walked - we saw it back in April at Milton Country Park, Cambridge. It is a wonderful one-man performance by actor Patrick Morris who re-walked the route with Waters last summer. We enjoyed it immensely - it has both laugh-out-loud funny moments and deeper heartfelt moments - a magical way to spend 90 minutes, especially if you are interested in the countryside, its past and its future. Personally, I think that it is an important work that needs to be seen more widely. Maybe it could be made into a tv production?“Playwright Steve Waters and actor Patrick Morris re-walked the route in June 2005, looking at how the landscape has changed since Clare’s day, and the development issues the entire region faces, examining the themes aired in Clare’s verse in a modern context: the connection between self and environment, between ownership and dispossession.”
I have come across only one review of Clare’s Walk by Jill Sharp for The British Theatre Guide.
Anyway - you have one more chance to see it. An extra production is being staged this Friday, 14 July, 6.00pm, at The Junction in Cambridge as part of the Hotbed 2006 Cambridge festival of new writing for the theatre.The play’s main source is a short journal Clare kept on his walk. This journal is freely accessible online - near the end of the ebook The Life of John Clare by Frederick Martin (thanks to Project Gutenberg, a large online repository of freely available ebooks). The Library holds many works by and about Clare and we currently have a small display on the first floor commemorating him and Steve Waters’ production.
Other links to John Clare include:
The John Clare Page
The John Clare Society
John Clare weblog [a poem a day]
Poem Hunter - John Clare [full text of 53 poems by John Clare].
Coincidentally, The John Clare Trust reports that, on Tuesday 4 July, it was awarded a ‘Stage One Pass’ from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for its project to buy and restore John Clare’s Cottage in Helpston [near Peterborough] and to open it to the public for the first time. This is where Clare was born and brought up.
Update (September 2006):
Sadly (for us), Steve Waters has left Homerton College to take up a drama post at University of Birmingham as Lecturer in Playwriting. Read his new profile.