Interview with playwright Barney Norris.

by Gwenni Hawkins

PostScript met with playwright Barney Norris, whose play Vistors first premiered at the Arcola earlier this year, and has returned to London at the Bush Theatre following a regional tour.

Critics are full of praise for Visitors, which is described as your first ‘full-length’ play. Can you say a bit about your previous forays into theatre?

I had previously written a 38 minute play called At First Sight, followed by a 50 minute play we called Fear of Music, for which Out Of Joint booked us a tour for. They were both two handers, and reflected the origin of our theatre company, which came out of a lunchbox- quite literally! First production we did, we kept all of the money in a tin lunchbox, for fear of it getting nicked. The plan behind these initial pieces of theatre was to make work we could get on a stage, and following the relative success of those, we had reached 2013, received our first Arts Council grant, and decided it was time to try a full-length play. Having said that, I first started Visitors in 2008, so it has been a good eight years in the growing.

So you’ve recently been shortlisted for the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright-did this come as a surprise?

There was a sense of surprise, because we were on at the time at a theatre which we weren’t sure was the kind of theatre they were looking towards. The Evening Standard have been so diverse and great this year though, through recognising us, and they’ve also given the Park Theatre two nods, which is so outward looking and exciting. The real surprise came back in March when they reviewed it and gave it five stars. At our press night back then, we hoped what we had produced was solid and was done to the best of our ability. So we thought if we got two four star reviews, then we won’t go bankrupt- and then the first review to come out gave it five stars. It was truthfully very moving and tearful.

There seems to be more of a trend now for looking further afield few new writing, not just focusing on the more obvious theatres. Would you say this is fair?

I think that very much is true, and I think the sources of the work are also diversifying. I came into theatre about 5 years ago and even in that time, I don’t think there was such a commitment from the theatre to document the diversity of the world. I think theatres such as The Bush, The Royal Court and The Young Vic are showing a breadth of human experience, in a very conscious way. The number of people that the programme at the Bush touches on and touches and speaks directly to is extraordinary. Friends say under Vicky Featherstone, the diversity of audiences at the Royal Court is now quite astounding, and I think that’s a very exciting thing. I’m not altogether sure where it starts- I wonder if it’s a wave of artistic directios who are very conscious of breadth now. Not there ever was a homogeny of experience I don’t think, I just think it’s more of a conscious effort now- there’s a heck of a lot of the world represented on the stages of London any one given night. I also think things are happening in terms of regional theatres, and how they participate in the stuff that gets airtime. Our company is from Wiltshire, and that experience growing up was quite monochrome- between ’97 and last year, there was one new play produced by Salisbury Playhouse, but now there are going to be more next year, so that theatre as an example really seems to be waking up. I think the way that co-production happens now, with everything being so much more networked, creates a more porous way of working.

So do you think that there’s more of a symbiotic relationship between regional and London-based theatres?

Hugely. I did two years as Max Stafford Clark’s assistant at Out Of Joint, and the sea- change we saw happen there was that from its existence 21 years ago, the only way its business model worked was through co-production between regional theatres and London theatres. What that does is obviously spread risk, and gives creative ownership over to cities and theatres all across the country, leading to an improved audience support and buy-in. Since then, it has now become standard practice to co-produce which is an interesting sea-change. There was a lot of shouting about how the Arts Council took money away from the sector, but one of the things this caused is a huge interconnectivity which is more stimulated and more interested than it was before those cuts. Seeing as the Arts Council were dealing with an impossible situation where they had to take money away from somebody, conversely I think the situation we’ve been left with is quite impressive. They’ve managed to create a business atmosphere where everyone’s talking to each other, and that’s really cool. There’s always more to do, but theatre as a tool for social engagement seems to be doing quite well at the moment, and I think there’s a way geography plays into this- for example, the Royal Court cannot serve people local to the Arcola in the way that the Arcola can- so that kind of greater social buy-in is happening. For an artists as well, it’s extraordinary to realise that your work matters to somebody, and could have an impact.

How and why do you think theatre as an art-form has this impact?

As you engage with funding criteria and tour planning, its striking to think there could be audiences out there who care about your work, and you want to reach them, and not just be something that’s just as good as telly. It’s about being more than entertainment- its not cost-efficient to solely be entertainment. I could watch a movie for much less, so theatre has to offer something else and different to justify itself. You start waking up to why the Arts Council put these funding criteria in, because when you’re 20, you don’t clock their significance, you’re just a kid who wants to be in the theatre and so you haven’t worked out this is this world of engagement, or ‘help’ you can offer people in their lives. I think a play is a space where an audience can go and think. You can provide a particular theme upon which they might ruminate, but really it’s a space for people to have their own space to think more deeply than they would ordinarily allow themselves to do. We took the show down to a hospice last week and did a couple of performances, and it was the most rewarding experience. There’s a lot of trepidation, because you don’t want to have trodden on toes or got anything wrong, because you haven’t lived those experiences, but nonetheless you have the most wonderful experience when people see the play, and then like it. That’s the thing about theatre- no other artform leaves you to think free from an obvious authority.

There seems to be a theme in the play about the current zeitgeist, or conflicting zeitgeists. How would you describe the intergenerational relationships in the play?

The idea was that Visitors was a play in three tenses. So you have the people who now are forced by circumstance to speak in the past tense and live retrospectively, you have this powerless human who’s living entirely in the future, and you have this person who is mired in the uncertainty of the conditionality of the present tense. That’s the neat, glib picture anyway! The idea was to document a change in the way our culture sets itself up. When I speak to my grandparents, who are 72 years married on Christmas Day this year, the way that human life was organised in this country say sixty years ago was much more to do with the circumstances of your birth. There is a point in one of Arthur’s key speeches that people were born into their lives, and then lived them. Culturally, there has been this transition to a place where there is much less certainty about life roles that we all play. I think there’s less determination, and I wanted to document that, partly because I think there’s a massive cultural amnesia around the kind of society we have lived in. I look at the money people spend, the adverts people don’t find repellent, and our grandparents were really hungry for years, and almost everybody in history has struggled to some extent to get by, and we live in this crazy world where we burn oil, and have these fabulous clothes, and it's so ugly. I hope all of the characters are sympathetic, I do love them dearly, and I don’t want to come down too hard on my own generation, I think the key thing was highlighted how amongst different generations, different problems spring up. I wanted to put on stage two people who never thought the point of their life was to change their circumstances- and is there something lovely in that constancy and fidelity as a life philosophy.

So I’m aware you grew up in Wiltshire, and a couple of other contemporary plays, most notably Jerusalem and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time are set in Wiltshire. What is it about this landscape or space that has lent itself to being an interesting setting?

One of the cohering things for writing this play over the years was Jerusalem, which is a total masterpiece and totally amazing, certainly one of the three best things I have ever seen in the theatre. But I did come away cross, and it took me a few days to work out why, and I came to the conclusion that what it felt like was a sort of ‘Greatest Hits’ album of Wiltshire. I know theatre isn’t about autobiographical truth, but as someone who was a Wiltshire lad was that I’d never really met the comedy vicar or the morris dancers or the May queen or the child-abusing hippie. And it is a wonderful play, I do really love it, but it did feel like a ‘Greatest Hits’ of my home county, and why am I not interesting enough to be in it? Why is the world I’m from not interesting enough unless there’s a giant in it? My brother put his finger on it when he sais- “well, the facts are wrong, aren’t they? There is no Panto in Salisbury Arts Centre”- at that moment, if you’re a Salisbury boy, you go “What are you talking about?” And I wanted to write a play that didn’t do the mystifying, lay-lines, Stonehenge-based depiction of Wiltshire. More people experience slight income deficits and issues around aging and schools, the pressure on agriculture. There are about 5 farms left in Wiltshire where Visitors could be believably set. The idea of a 200-acre farm is vanishingly rare. The way that land is used has changed and coming from having lived in places where that’s what everyone does for a living, it is a very interesting story to document, because it’s really complicated and problematic. I wanted to write a play that was about loving people, and what I thought Wiltshire was about.

What does post-Vistors life look like for you and your theatre company Up in Arms? What’s next?

I’m going to try and not supplement myself with any non-writing work, and try and make that my primary focus from hereon in. I mean, I don’t expect to ever eat anything other than chickpeas, but nonetheless it’s amazing! Up in Arms would like to put out two touring productions a year, so that we can really build up a relationship with our audiences. We’d also like to start doing plays by other writers, and look towards diversifying our working partners. We want to have a quality of work, a style. We want to make funny plays, which are actually sad, or to quote the more polished tagline: we want to make plays which are honest, human, affecting, revealing.

Dates

02 December - 10 January15

Wednesday Matinees

03rd, 10th, 17th, 31st of December and 07th of January

Saturday Matinees

06th, 13th, 20th of December and 03rd, 10th of January

Bush Theatre

7 Uxbridge Road

London

W12 8LJ

Box Office:

020 8743 5050Monday - Saturday, 12pm - 8pm

www.bushtheatre.co.uk

@PostScriptJour

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