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Out of Your Knowledge | Reviews

REVIEWS

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Guardian - 13th August 2008
"Steve Waters' tender, wistful play...bleakly funny"

Recreation of an Extraordinary Journey

In July 1841, the poet John Clare, incarcerated in an asylum at Epping Forest for four years, discharged himself and decided to walk home. Home was in Northamptonshire, 80 miles away, and his expedition – sleeping in ditches, eating grass by the roadside – took an excruciating three days to complete. That extraordinary journey is the map for Steve Waters' tender, wistful solo play, which traces the poet's footsteps through the strange terrain of five counties he would never see again.
The exact landscape that Clare saw is, of course, all but gone. Waters' script, vividly delivered by Patrick Morris to the accompaniment of Denise Neapolitan's solo violin, is bleakly funny as it attempts to locate the poet's spirit in a baffling maze of suburbs and tarmac. From Epping, the playwright strikes out via Enfield, all menacing estates and BNP posters, along the grimly named London-Peterborough Growth Corridor, towards St Neots and Stilton. He downs pints of London Pride with the folk from the Campaign for Rural England, glimpses a buzzard in the woods further down the trail. Trapped inside the air-conditioned glass of the Howard mall at Welwyn Garden City, he cruises past Millie's Cookies and Topshop as The Girl from Ipanema plays disconsolately.
There's something Iain Sinclairish about the project (Sinclair has indeed written about Clare's walk), but the most likeable thing about this modest little piece is its refusal to preach, whether about England's lost greenery or the identikit landscape that has replaced it. Morris is an entertaining and watchable guide, gamely standing in for the host of rural campaigners, farmers and civil engineers he meets en route - even, at one mildly ill-advised moment, impersonating an endangered tree. He dons waistcoat, scarf and boots at the play's end to bring the poet to life.
Embroidered with remembrances half-recovered and longings half-told, and coloured by the awestruck lyricism of Clare's verse, Out of Your Knowledge suggests that the journeys we take are often deep into ourselves.

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broadwaybaby.com - 12th August 2008
"...vibrant and passionate...an absolute must."

Stunning Review from Broadway Baby.com

“Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but you know the way things are going, back may be the only way of going forward” So speaks Jim one of the many and varied characters that Steve Waters and Patrick Morris encountered as they re-trod the steps of poet John Clare after he left the asylum in Epping Forrest to which he had been confined and walked home to Northborough. Out Of Your Knowledge is peppered with other such pieces of wisdom and I have to say that I agree with Jim I have learnt a lot about the present state of rural England through Waters and Morris’ vibrant and passionate re-telling of Clare’s walk.

John Clare (1793-1864) was a poet who began by outselling Keats but by the time he wrote the poem which inspired this piece was out of print, and as the two stays in an asylum indicate, was slowly deteriorating.

Re-creating the walk of a relatively unknown Victorian poet is not a subject which would immediately appeal to me and this is why this is such an impressive and wonderful production because by the end of it, I absolutely cared. I cared passionately about common land, of the beauty of natural reserves and the unstoppable sprawling of the industrial world. When Morris asks ‘will it just be one huge city from London to Peterborough’ the thought fills me with dread.

Punctuated by beautiful fiddle playing (Denise Neapolitan) which at turns powers the piece along and at others dances with it in a duet, Out Of Your Knowledge is a fantastic piece of story telling which fully uses all of the magic of theatre to create a show which is at times hypnotic. We skip from place to place, through strides and jumps, through dreams and characters that lead into one another rhythmically sometimes in time with the music, sometimes apposed to it. The voices of people they’ve met on the way are introduced and them melt away as they are left behind and Clare’s ghost hangs ever present in the air, a constant companion.

Morris is a charismatic performer who quietly and strongly takes the audience along with him on this journey of memory and discovery. His characterisations are detailed and intricate and often hilarious without ever falling into cliche. As he bounds around the stage the whole space rumbles and his powerful physicality mirrors the earthiness of England’s rural land. No corner is ignored, no voice unheard. When he evokes the spirit of Brampton Wood it is hard not to feel that you are seeing and hearing something truly shamanistic and special.

Whenever John Clare went walking, whether it was for 3 miles or 300 he would pronounce himself ‘out of my knowledge’ and this is a show which explores this sense of losing yourself in a landscape beautifully, coherently and with an immense amount of heart, forging a greater understanding of the present through this journey through the past. I was not expecting to feel so much for this show and I came out of the theatre infused with a warmth and strength from it. An absolute must.

[Honour Bayes]

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Guardian - 7th July 2008
"Cambridge's excellent new writing producers, Menagerie have two shows..."

"Edinburgh Gems", Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, July 7th

Keep an eye out for... Cambridge's excellent new writing producers, Menagerie have two shows Steve Waters' Out Of Your Knowledge and Correspondence by Claire MacDonald.

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