Christopher Gray reports back from a production of the new Barney Norris play, Visitors

Barney Norris’s excellent new play Visitors offers gentle wit and diverting insights sufficient to compensate — in this reviewer’s opinion at least — for its generally depressing tone. Its concern is with the problems of the elderly, ever a gloomy topic and especially so when, as here, we are shown somone suffering from a punishing affliction of old age, dementia, and only too aware of it.

“What you want to say builds up like water behind a dam,” says the failing Edie, brilliantly portrayed by the great Linda Bassett, “but the dam will never open again. You talk about the past when you mean to ask for the butter knife.”

The words are addressed to blue-haired teenager Katie (Eleanor Wyld) who has been brought into Edie’s home — a farmhouse in rural Wiltshire — to provide round-the-clock care for her now the task is seen to be beyond her husband Arthur (Robin Soans).

Still at work (just) with his livestock and crops, he shares with Edie — with all old people, we must think — a propensity to live in the past, recalling happy memories and regrets. Sometimes these surprise and amuse. “I would have liked to have tried LSD,” he says, to which the still-feisty Edie replies: “We still could you know.”

One powerful regret, especially for an unforgiving Arthur, is that their only child Stephen (Simon Muller) declined to take on the family farm and opted for a job in insurance. He is the play’s other ‘visitor’ and no less interesting — dull dog as he seems at the outset — than the other characters.

What seems at first to have been a normal family life involving the three of them, turns out as the action proceeds to have been anything but. There are aspects to his present life, too, that come to surprise.

Barney Norris has a rich gift for showing life as it is led. Impeccably acted under director Alice Hamilton, the play announces the arrival of a major new talent.