A new play about the lesser-known Assisi saint deliberately asks how much we would be prepared to give up for our beliefs.

Among the millions of tourists who have visited Assisi through the years were, unknown to each other then, two young girls: Blanche, who visited from England with her parents, and Chiara, an Italian-American whose mother had grown up near to the Italian town and who would often take her daughter back there.

Blanche remembers her trip well. “I was about six or seven. We walked up the street of tat and knick-knacks and into the church and down to the tomb of St Francis. And I felt the peace and quiet arrive even at that age.”

Chiara also did the Franciscan tour, many times. And though a tourist might not notice this, Assisi is a town of two saints – and she was interested in the other one. “Given that my name is Clare in Italian and I grew up in the United States where nobody is called Chiara, as soon as I heard there was a really famous one who was a saint, I instantly clued into her.”

Decades later, Chiara Atik’s play, Poor Clare, is being directed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, south-west London, by Blanche McIntyre. Set in the thirteenth century, it shows how two contemporary figures – Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone and Chiara Offreduccio – each renounced their family wealth to become a friar and a sister. Both went on to found religious orders – his, the Franciscans; hers, the Poor Clares – dedicated to poverty and service. Redressing the emphasis of their home town’s tourist industry – and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, in which she is a secondary presence – St Clare is the title and central character of the play.

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