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.
