Ohmigod you guys – Chiara Atik’s award-winning but glib 2022 play uses idiomatic modern American dialogue to tell the story of St Clare, a wealthy 13th-century noblewoman who joined St Francis of Assisi in a life of poverty and piety. This juxtaposition of historic and contemporary, familiar from the likes of The Favourite and The Great, is more stark here as the theme is not power and sex but wealth inequality.

Blanche McIntyre’s production plays up to the wit of Atik’s writing and features a poised and confident stage debut from Arsema Thomas, whose “super-cute” Valley Girl Clare is slowly radicalised. But the hand-wringing parallels drawn between unfairness in the Middle Ages and the present day become laboured.

The play feels like an easy “mea culpa” for liberal audiences, a tourists’ guilt-trip to a place far, far way where morality overcomes complacent self-interest. No wonder it was garlanded by critics in America, where faith is politically weaponised and the economics of society in general, and theatre in particular, are even more polarised than here.

Anyway, we first see Thomas’s privileged Clare having her hair elaborately dressed by servants before she meets her much older and even richer suitor. Her bratty sister Beatrice (Anushka Chakravarti) is, like, totally jealous. The women gossip about the Crusades and about a man who stripped naked in the piazza in front of the local bishop as a protest against poverty.