In 1970, Freddie Jones played the part of John Clare (“a minor nature poet who went mad… ”) in a BBC Omnibus broadcast. Forty five years later, his son Toby revisits the role, retreading Clare’s 80-mile walk from an asylum near Epping Forest to his Northborough home in search of lost love Mary Joyce. As Toby wanders, Freddie reads from a collection of Clare’s autobiographical writings, providing a quasi-commentary for this strange odyssey.
Part drama, part documentary, part enthralled (sh)amble, By Our Selves finds director Andrew Kötting and writer/collaborator Iain Sinclair indulging their passion for Clare without necessarily engaging ours. En route, we encounter celebrated graphic novelist Alan Moore, who describes the inescapable Northampton as “a cultural black hole with an incredible mass”, hear from Professor Simon Kövesi (dressed as a prizefighter, one of Clare’s many delusional personae), who discusses misogyny and obscenity in the poet’s work, and watch Sinclair sport a Wicker Man goat mask while Kötting dresses as a straw bear, a representation of “the madness inside John Clare’s head”. The result is typically idiosyncratic; often intriguing, sometimes insightful, occasionally exasperating.
