Playwright Barney Morris welcomes Visitors

Playwright Barney Norris is not ashamed to admit that he cried when he read the first review of Visitors, the touring production from his company Up in Arms which visits the North Wall in Oxford next Wednesday.

Barney’s were tears of happiness. Hardly surprising since Evening Stand-ard critic Henry Hitchings, honouring his work with five stars, had written: “Barney Norris’s first full-length play is astonishingly accomplished. As this extraordinarily mature piece demonstr-ates, Norris is a perceptive and humane craftsman . . . a talent to watch.”

Nor was Hitchings’s a lone voice. Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph (four stars) wrote of Visitors, which in part supplies an eloquent picture of dementia offered by the acclaimed actor Linda Bassett: “This is . . . an absolute beauty, by turns funny, tender and desperately sad.”

Ian Shuttleworth, the Financial Times’s critic, praised the play for its “modest eloquence”, calling it “quietly compelling”. The compliments were made no less welcome by his mistake in thinking the writer to be a woman. (How many female Barneys do you know?)

Norris is, in fact, a man of 27 with what is quite evidently a preternatural passion for theatre. He talks about the subject, and his involvement in it, with enormous enthusiasm, and at such speed, flying off at all tangents, that it is a task indeed for the humble scribe’s pen to ‘glean his teeming brain’. This is to paraphrase a line of Keats’s which Barney will surely recognise since poetry is another of his passions. The enthusiasm dates back to his schooldays at Salisbury Grammar School, where novelist William Golding once taught and was still well remembered in his day by a number of teachers. A breakthrough in his writing life came during his third year reading English at Keble College, Oxford, when he was farmed out (after careful planning on his part) to study W.B. Yeats under one of his heroes, the Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue, of Wadham College.

“That was a transformative experience in my life,” he says. “I don’t think I would have had much of a career if it hadn’t been for Bernard.” One impulse to buckle down to his own work came when O’Donoghue took him to a Yeats conference in County Sligo, the poet’s birthplace. There he met the Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney. “All he wanted to talk about was rugby.” Barney fortunately knew this language too.

The big names of culture have loomed large in Barney’s life. Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, was among his teachers on a two-year creative writing course at Royal Holloway. Playwright Sir David Hare, whose early (and unfashionable) Fanshen Barney once directed, became a mentor to the extent of being a referee when he applied to work as assistant to the legendary Max Stafford-Clark, founder of the theatre company Out of Joint. Though famously unfazed by celebrity, the director raised an eyebrow at this (“he said: ‘Aren’t you posh!’”) — and gave Barney the job.

Then there is Peter Gill, the celebrated Welsh playwright, with whose work that of Barney is, to his delight, most often compared. The two worked together at the Bush Theatre. In February, Barney published a book on him, To Bodies Gone: The Theatre of Peter Gill (Seren).

Barney’s approach to writing for the stage is founded in the belief that “theatre is a way of starting conversations”. He says: “Our raison d’etre in Up in Arms is to make plays about people in the places they are from and tie them to the period they are about. I think good theatre when it works well is a forum for the expression of the community where it plays to.”

In Visitors, which features in his view “four faultless performances”, he goes back to an area close to the scenes of his childhood, in the Wiltshire countryside. To quote from the company’s publicity: “Visitors is a comedy and a love story about a family falling apart in a farm-house at the edge of Salisbury Plain. Stephen can’t afford to put his mother into care; Arthur can’t afford to stop working and look after his wife. When a young stranger with blue hair moves in to care for Edie as her mind unravels, the family is forced to ask: are we living the way we wanted? Examin-ing the rural recession and later life care, Visitors takes a touching and haunting look at the way our lives slip past us.”

Barney recognises that the play is at present being denied the larger audience that its reviewers suggest it deserves. As part of Up in Arms’ commitment to take theatre where it is needed, he and the company’s director Alice Hamilton are considering a rural tour, perhaps in Oxfordshire, taking in village halls and the like.

He is already at work on another play in which his thoughts on the difficulties of running country pubs are conflated with ideas concerning the machine wreckers of early industrial England. He is also writing a novel about life in Salisbury. Appropriately for a place where five rivers meet, it will tell five interwoven stories.

We are clearly going to hear much of Barney Norris in years to come.

Visitors
The North Wall, Oxford
Wed, April 2, at 8pm
Box office: 01865 319450 or www.thenorthwall.com