Book tickets here:

http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/events/falling-a-poetry-reading-by-barney-norris/

First written for Waifs and Strays theatre company as a response to the book CHAVS: THE DEMONISATION OF THE WORKING CLASS by Owen Jones, and staged in March and October 2012 at the Lyric Hammersmith, SCHNAPPS is a story about three women working in an ASDA in the north of England. The company have had an exhilirating workshop week, improvising scenes, visiting the ASDA on the Isle of Dogs and receiving a warm, informative, fascinating welcome from the staff there. Jake will now be producing a full-length play from the material gathered in the last week.

ASDA is an abbreviation of ‘Asquith and Dairies’. We will now be calling it that whenever we shop there.

Production photos by Louise Buckby for Karl Andre.

Rehearsal photos by Adam Corcoran -http://500px.com/AdamCorcoran

Wisehammer: It doesn’t matter when a play is set. It’s better if it’s set in the past, it’s clearer.

What’s the most effective way of engaging with the present state of England? Are we best able to get to grips with what’s happening in our country over a pint; out of a history book; by following the news from parliament? Where can we take ownership of the ideas and problems that characterise and pattern our society, and best attempt to understand them?

I work at the touring theatre company Out of Joint, where our Artistic Director, Max Stafford-Clark, believes that different societies come up with different answers to these questions. In Australia, he suggests, the novel seems to be the place where the identity and history of that country is interrogated. I’d suggest that in America, it might be the cinema that shows people who they are and who they could be. In Britain, Stafford-Clark suggests the theatre plays that role.

Whatever the form though, history seems to suggest that art has a role to play in answering these questions. By presenting life in the abstract, art creates a distance across which we, usually too busy with the business of living to wonder how we’re doing at it, are able to observe ourselves, become self-reflexive, and think a little. Art creates space in which we can think, and formulates the messy moralities of individuals into a coherent statement for analysis. On this island, that function has been performed by artists working in every conceivable genre – but I think Stafford-Clark has a point when he argues that the theatre has been of particular value to us in this regard. It’s in the nature of plays that they should comment effectively on group behaviour – they are written to be presented to a large, live audience, gathered together in the same place at the same time, and right back to the beginning of the theatre they have performed a reflective function – as Governor Phillip observes in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good, ‘the Greeks believed it was a citizen’s duty to go to the theatre.’ They hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.

What, then, is the potential of the theatre as a lens through which to examine society? It has limits like anything else, of course – it can’t keep pace with the news agenda without sacrificing its virtues as a crafted idea – but what it does very well indeed is provide us with greater room for reflection on the subjects it interrogates. In Our Country’s Good, Dabby Bryant and John Wisehammer disagree about the best way to use a play. Dabby would rather put her own life under lights, while Wisehammer thinks more can be learned from observing someone else’s.

While writing my new play, Fear Of Music, I found myself engaging with the same dilemma – I wanted to write a play that interrogated the state we were in. What sort of mirror should I be using to remove the log from my own eye? Was it not possible that I would best learn how to perform such major surgery by first removing the speck from someone else’s, and transposing contemporary questions into another place and Fear Of Music is a look at England now – a story about isolated young people living through recession, left to their own devices by a country that doesn’t look after its own. It’s the story of what’s happening to my generation. In order to best address this current crisis, however, I have ended up writing not about now but about Thatcher’s England. I took my cue from Seamus Heaney, who has said that he avoided the subject of politics in Ireland during the 70s and 80s because the poets who attempted to engage with it tended to produce what he and his contemporaries termed ‘Troubles trash’ – work too snared in the headlines to add much depth to life.

My feeling is that plays are emblematic. They are metaphors whose significance is assigned and invented by their audience. As David Hare has observed, a play happens in the air between the audience and the performance – its meanings are discerned by the eye of the beholder, not the playwright or director or anyone on the stage (to underline the point, it’s worth relating that when Out of Joint produced Hare’s The Permanent Way,an exploration of the privatisation of British Rail and the consequences of that, Hare records meeting one friend in tears after a performance who said to him, ‘I didn’t know you’d written a play about AIDS’ – an extension of the metaphor of Hare’s play into the political consciousness of that individual which happens when the metaphor works, and is the reason that a play such as, say, Hamlet moves us – the reason we weep for Hecuba).

With this in mind, I resolved that the best way I could address our current political situation was to develop first of all an effective metaphor, rather than prioritise enumerating the challenges we are facing under this government. My audience, after all, already know what those are.

The useful function I could perform was to provide space and a scaffold for the ideas and thoughts we all already have about England now, in order to allow them to run as eloquently as possible through the minds of the people watching my play.

Jonathan Miller recently criticised the systematic transposition of old plays to new settings – ‘if someone has had the wisdom to write about their own period, then it becomes a document of its moment. Directors just ‘theatre-schlep’ when they simply dump a production in another era. It stops it from being a witness of where it comes from.’ I found myself wondering what his view might be of my play, or indeed of Our Country’s Good – plays which transpose not settings but arguments across space and time. His observations made me wonder whether I was avoiding the head-on collision with my subject that might become possible if I set my play in 2013. Or was I right to suspect, as Heaney did, that very little is ever learned from a head-on collision? On reflection, I would argue that one reason art has been continually effective in informing societies about the way they are living is that all meaning is best discerned across a distance. By offering a different context for which the problems which beset us can be observed, I believe it is possible for a play to bear more suggestive witness.

This piece also appeared on Exeunt Magazine here.

In 2008 I was in a play called Through the Leaves by the German writer Franz Xaver Kroetz, in a production directed by Alice Hamilton, the director of Fear Of Music. I hadn’t previously encountered Kroetz, Germany’s most frequently performed living playwright, and his work fascinated me. I thought Through The Leaves was incredible: a portrait of a failed affair between a butcher and a roaming drunk (that was me) that put life on stage and demanded we pay it attention. I thought, I want to write a play like that. I’d just written my first short play, a piece called At First Sight about the memory of a failed affair, which was very romantic, and wanted to try something different. This uncompromising portrait of real life, not commenting, just showing, struck me as an exciting model.

The story of Fear Of Music started with two ideas. Firstly, I thought I could write about the experience of sharing a bedroom with your brother; secondly, I wanted to explore an image Alice’s mother Jane had put in my head. Jane told me that on the day she had moved out of her childhood home, the last time she looked into the kitchen, she had seen herself and her family five years earlier in the room – not remembered it, but seen the memory taking place in front of her eyes. I thought that was an amazing trigger for a play, so I wrote about two brothers refracted through the lens of memory. Alice didn’t think it was very good. I did a workshop and a reading and discovered she was right. The play went on the back burner, a story without impetus I put in a drawer.

Then, in 2010, I walked past an army recruitment poster that said ‘this is my life: I want to do more with it than flip burgers’, and knew at once that I had to go home and get back to writing. The slogan struck me as an incredibly offensive piece of bullying – a targeted belittling by the state. The idea that the Army marketing department might play on the insecurities of ordinary people suffering from a lack of opportunity in order to put them in the line of fire seemed abhorrent: so I went home and wrote another layer into my story. I organised another reading, and Alice and I began to plan a production.

I’m cautious about sounding rabidly anti-army. This November 11th the company of Fear Of Music went to the Remembrance Day service in Andover, where the play is set. We were struck by the beauty of the idea the army presented of itself at that ceremony, which strikes me as the central ritual of our society (it seems to me that England in the last century has been, above all, a story about the war). My grandfather lost three brothers in the Great War, and still lives a hundred metres from the memorial where their names are inscribed. The sacrifices made by soldiers for my life are woven into my family’s identity, and at that level, the level of the individual soldier, I feel conscious of a tremendous debt to the people who make up the army. But my argument wasn’t with them. The army is an arm of the state – and it’s a failure of our state if, rather than working to improve conditions for those on low incomes or in deprived areas, we exploit their insecurities and aggress them into barracks, a systematic practise documented by Forces Watch: http://www.forceswatch.net/what_why. It’s feudal.

I hadn’t known at first that I wanted to set the play in Andover. But then the Tories got into power and in late 2010, while I was working at the Bush Theatre, announced new benefit caps for families. People I knew on benefits in Shepherds Bush just laughed at these: there was no way a family could live on that in that area. I learned that on the day these caps had been announced, Hammersmith and Fulham council had block-booked B&Bs across Brentford for the weeks following the date the new rates were due to come into effect. They weren’t aloof or disconnected; they had done the maths, and knew families on benefits would have to leave the area. It was planned social cleansing, ideological violence.

I wanted to engage with this, but I didn’t want to write about ‘now’. Seamus Heaney has said that at the height of the Troubles, he and his contemporaries avoided writing about the situation around them because such an attempt tended to produce what he called ‘Troubles trash’. I felt like I read and saw a lot of ‘banking trash’ being made around me too. So I looked for a time when what I wanted to write about – the shuffling of the working class out of city centres, a receding jobs market, a lack of opportunity, a sense of powerlessness, the overpowering shadow of the city on the lives of the people around me – had also been relevant. And I ended up looking at Thatcher.

Andover became the setting because I grew up there and could do the accent; because it’s a military town, a natural setting for this story, and because during the 80s Andover became a battleground for the abnegation of social responsibility. From the 60s, the London Overspill relocations project transformed Andover from a town of 5,000 to one of 50,000. Facing overcrowding in the metropolis, the GLC paid to turn places like Andover into overspill towns, and relocated people in social housing out to the country. In Andover, this wasn’t the end of the story: by the 80s, it was clear the new housing was so badly built it would have to be done again. Andover Council got a lot of coverage when it had to bring a suit against the GLC before they made a settlement to pay for this second draft of the new town. Nowhere was it more painfully clear how unwanted the public were by the state. So that seemed like a good place to write a play about forgotten people.

COMPANY

Hasan Dixon | Luke

Theatre includes: The Alchemist (Liverpool Playhouse); The Glass Menagerie (Everyman Theatre); You The Player (West Yorkshire Playhouse/Look Left Look Right); Stand Up Diggers All! (Pentabus); Yerma (Gate/Hull Truck); Ghosts (London Classic Theatre); Word Play; Boars and Dragonflies, The Spanish Tragedy (Arcola); The Return (Southwark Playhouse); The Little Prince (Exeter Bike Shed); None But Friends (Rose Theatre); ‘A’ Straight (Undeb); Publishing A Piece (BAC); The Jungle Book (Birmingham Stage Company); Little Hope (The Point, Eastleigh). Television includes: Silent Witness, A Touch of Frost, Doctors. Film includes: John Carter, Coincidence.

Jack Finch | Andy

Andy is in his final year at Central School of Speech and Drama. This is his professional stage debut.

CREATIVE TEAM

Barney Norris | Writer

Barney’s plays are At First Sight and Fear Of Music. His first pamphlet of poems, Falling, has just been published, and his first book, To Bodies Gone: The Theatre of Peter Gill, is forthcoming from Seren. He works at Out of Joint as assistant to Max Stafford-Clark and acts regularly as assistant to Peter Gill.

Alice Hamilton | Director

Alice’s productions for Up In Arms include At First Sight (tour and Latitude Festival) and Missing (Tristan Bates Theatre). Other directing includes: Belarus (Arcola Theatre for The Miniaturists). She was casting director on Bloody Poetry (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2012) and Shiverman (Theatre 503, 2012), and assistant director on the Agamemnon (Oxford Playhouse, 2008) Step 9 (of 12) (Trafalgar Studios, 2012) Sappho… In Nine Fragments (Greenwich Theatre, 2012) and Tu I Teraz (Hampstead Theatre, Southampton Nuffield and Colchester Mercury, 2012-13). Forthcoming theatre includes assistant director on A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg (Rose Theatre/Liverpool Playhouse).

Carys Rose Beard | Designer

Carys trained at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Theatre as designer includes: I Am England (Egg Theatre Bath), The Strange Disappearance of a Lady Parachutist (Chapter Arts, Cardiff), The Get Together (Sherman Theatre Cardiff), The Best Years of your Life (nabokov), O Go My Man (RWCMD). Other theatre includes Branches: The Nature of Crisis (National Theatre Wales, design assistant), Wicked (Apollo Theatre, costume runner), The King’s Speech (Germany, costume maker). Film as designer includes: A Welshman’s Guide to Breaking Up. carysbeard.wix.com/designer

Simon Gethin Thomas | Lighting Designer

Simon is a London-based designer, and trained for a Master’s Degree in Lighting at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Recent production credits include Orpheus in the Underworld (Opera’r Ddraig), I’d Kill for You: Medea (Action to the Word), Revolutionaries in Vienna (Arensky Chamber Orchestra) and Blood Wedding (RWCMD). Previous designs for tours include Macbeth (CAST), Albert Herring (Shadwell Opera), The Taming of the Shrew (CUETG) and Good For You (Footlights). For more information, please visit: www.simongethinthomas.com

Tom Gibbons | Sound Designer

Tom trained at Central School of Speech and Drama and is resident sound designer for the international physical theatre company Parrot{in the}Tank.

Recent design credits include: Excursions; Just Above The Below; Freeman Gallop; Storm out of a Teacup (Parrot{in the}Tank); Dead Heavy Fantastic (Liverpool Everyman); Plenty (Sheffield Crucible Studio); Love Love Love (Paines Plough, National Tour); The Machine Gunners (Polka); The Chairs (Theatre Royal, Bath); The Country; Road To Mecca; The Roman Bath; 1936; The Shawl (Arcola); Terror Tales (Hampstead Studio); The Hostage; Present Tense (Southwark Playhouse); Faustus (Watford Palace, Tour); Faithless Bitches (Courtyard); The Knowledge; Little Platoons; 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover; 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover@Xmas; Broken Space Season (Bush Theatre); Bagpuss; Everything Must Go; Soho Streets (Soho Theatre); Holes (New Wimbledon Studio); FAT (The Oval House); Just Me Bell (Graeae, Tour); Blue Heaven (Finborough); Pitching In (Latitude Festival, Tour); Overspill; Shape Of Things; Old Man and The Sea; This Limetree Bower; Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (Cockpit); US Love Bites (Old Red Lion, Tristan Bates); I Can Sing A Rainbow (Nabokov/Lyceum Sheffield); Pendulum (Jermyn Street); Journalist and Hope (ICA London); Machinal (Central); Bar Of Ideas (Paradise Gardens Festival and Glastonbury/Shangri-La). As Associate: The Aliens (Bush Theatre)

Charlie Young | Stage Manager

Charlie recently graduated from Middlesex University in Theatre Arts (Design and Technical Theatre). Recent stage management credits include The Snail and The Whale - Tall Stories (Hong Kong, Singapore and UK Tour); Miss Julie (Tristan Bates and Edinburgh Fringe); Jesus Christ Superstar (Ljubljana, Slovenia); The Hairy Ape (Southwark Playhouse) and Third Floor (Trafalgar Studios).

At a time when the Arts Council are under extraordinary pressure from the strangulating effects of this government’s savage economic policy, it’s testament to their inspiring commitment to new work that they are still willing to back a new company. We feel very fortunate, and their support will spur us all to greater efforts.

We’re telling a story about what happens on the streets of England when our state recedes and our country doesn’t look after its own: thanks to the Arts Council, and the support of Out of Joint, we’ll be able to shout longer and louder about an issue we believe is of vital importance to us all.

Up In Arms present a beautifully observed and beguilingly funny drama about two brothers with starkly different futures.

Luke is the first in his family to go to university, and he’s determined to stop his irritating fireball of a brother from following in their father’s footsteps by joining the army.

In a vivid, detailed and often hilarious 75 minutes, Fear of Music time-bends between 1985 and 1990, piecing together the prelude and aftermath of a tragedy that sees history repeating itself.

Packed with beautiful observation and outrageously good jokes, Fear Of Music is a brilliant burst of a play in which two boys with starkly different futures, surrounded by mixtapes, guitars and ambitions, discover how easy it is to get lost in a country that doesn’t look after its own.

Written by Barney Norris
Directed by Alice Hamilton
Designed by Carys Rose Beard
With the support of Out of Joint: www.outofjoint.co.uk.

TOUR DATES

19-20 February York Theatre Royal
01904 623 568 | www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

25-26 February Hull Truck Theatre
01482 323 638 | www.hulltruck.co.uk

27 February South Shields Customs House
01914 541 234 | www.customshouse.co.uk

28 Feb – 2 March London Tristan Bates Theatre
0207 240 6283 | www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk

11-13 March Oxford Playhouse
01865 305 305 | www.oxfordplayhouse.com

14 March Andover James’s Place
01264 772 400 | www.james-place.co.uk

19-20 March Ipswich High School for Girls
01473 780 201 | www.ipswichhigh.gdst.net

22 March Middlesbrough Theatre
01642 815 181 | www.middlesbroughtheatre.co.uk

25-26 March Salisbury Playhouse
01722 320 333 | www.salisburyplayhouse.com

27 March Norden Farm Arts Centre
01628 788 997 | www.nordenfarm.org

REVIEWS

“This is smart work” Daily Telegraph

“That most poignant of cocktails: youthful hope mixed with youthful disillusionment… See this memorable, touching, unsettling, occasionally funny, and thought-provoking play now” British Theatre Guide

“Being able to write this way while also making your audience ache in recognition is a wonderful thing… Both actors nail the painfully awkward mannerisms of adolescence… These boys live thin, sad lives, full of petty rivalry and boredom but by the end of their story, it is a sense of fierce ambition and a deep, compassionate love that one comes away with” Exeunt

“Well-observed with a dash of nostalgia and, despite the bleak background, often humorous, the piece is as a snapshot of a family – and a country – struggling against the odds.” A YoungerTheatre

“Roars of laughter of recognition from the enthusiastic audience. A highly impressive evening” RemoteGoat

Up In Arms previously presented FEAR OF MUSIC, under the title MISSING, at the Tristan Bates Theatre in February 2012.

–

With thanks to Simon Gethin Thomas for photos.

A few snaps from our visit to Andover, the setting of FEAR OF MUSIC, this weekend to attend the remembrance day service and present a reading of the play at our venue in Penton Mewsey.

Shortly after the production closed, Out of Joint offered to support a UK revival tour of the play. We are delighted to announce that FEAR OF MUSIC will therefore re-open on February 19th at York Theatre Royal, and tour the UK till the end of March, playing at venues including Hull Truck, Oxford Playhouse and Salisbury Playhouse.

Alice Hamilton returns to direct, and we are joined by Chloe Courtney as producer and Carys Rose Beard as designer. We’ll keep you posted of dates and details through this site – full tour listings to follow shortly.

We workshopped MEAT with Joe back in the summer, and are delighted to hear of his success.

Barney will direct SCHNAPPS by Jake Brunger as part of a set of writer’s responses to CHAVS: THE DEMONISATION OF THE WORKING CLASS by Owen Jones at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio on October 3rd, 4th and 5th, and Alice will direct Denise Keane’s BELARUS as part of Miniaturists 37 at the Arcola Theatre on october 21st. They’re excellent pieces by excellent writers in excellent nights.

The play, which was kick-started with a workshop this summer at Salisbury Playhouse, will be read from on the Nuffield’s main stage at 7.45 on October 31st.

Max founded Joint Stock Theatre Group in 1974 following his Artistic Directorship of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. From 1979 to 1993 he was Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre. In 1993 he founded the touring company Out of Joint.

Having benefited immensely from the support of John Adams during our production of WINTERREISE, we’re delighted to once again be able to draw on the expertise of a great director in creating new theatre. Max Stafford-Clark, whose workshop process has had a major influence on the design of this project, helped launch the careers of many of the country’s leading writers, including our Patron David Hare. The chance to learn from him and to improve our work with his guidance and support is a huge opportunity for Up In Arms, and we’re grateful for his support and generosity, and the support of Out of Joint.

If you want to get involved, share your stories, and support the development of a new play for the city, contact us – we want to hear from you! Email barney@upinarms.org.uk for information.

Hailing from the city ourselves, we want to explore the stories of young people in the area, collecting a composite portrait of the place and its society through an interview and improvisation process. We hope we’ll have more to report shortly…

Two new writers developed by Up In Arms

We will hold a reading of two new plays by two new writers on Sunday, June 24th at 5pm, in Out of Joint’s rehearsal room. We’re delighted to be working with Ella Evans and Joe Ledbury, two writers who grew up in the south west and offer striking and moving portraits of modern urban life in their work.

Our company for the readings is Helen Bradbury, Elizabeth Crarer, Rob Heaps, Tom Mcdonald, Paul Raymond, Ian Redford and Joe Robertson. We’re delighted to welcome Lizzie, Rob and Joe back to Up In Arms, and to be working with Helen, Tom, Paul and Ian for the first time.

A selection of photos from Missing.

Barney Norris asks why Maggie is such a current issue in the arts.

An interesting excavation has been taking place in theatre, on television and in film over the last year – the divisive figure of Margaret Thatcher has returned to our screens and stages, emerging once more at the forefront of the cultural and conversational agenda. Lindsay Duncan, Andrea Riseborough and Meryl Streep have all given readings, investigating the human story behind a woman who, for decades, has stood for so much as a symbol rather than an individual. Thatcher is, in many ways, a character of Shakespearean scale – embodying whole worlds in what she means to different people and dominating the stage of her generation. Now, her credentials as a Shakespearean figure have been enhanced by a significantly expanded performance history. Streep’s performance in THE IRON LADY, in particular, was anticipated in much the same way as David Tennant’s, Jude Law’s, or Michael Sheen’s Hamlets: what would she do with the story? What would she bring to the role? Thatcher, like a character in a play, can’t be viewed in isolation: we have to see her in relation to other people’s visions and revisions.

On stage, we have been reminded of her function as symbol by Out of Joint’s revival of TOP GIRLS, Caryl Churchill’s extraordinary play. In TOP GIRLS, Thatcher becomes an idea, an uncrossable distance between two sisters whose life choices have driven them very far apart. Robert Holman’s play MAKING NOISE QUIETLY, soon to be directed by Peter Gill at the Donmar Warehouse, also looks at her impact on ordinary lives. And in my new play MISSING, which opens next week at the Tristan Bates Theatre, Thatcher plays a similar role – MISSING tells the story of two brothers, Luke and Andy, who have been born into empty lives and are growing up sharing a bedroom in 1980s England. As in TOP GIRLS, Thatcher is mentioned only once – but she hangs over the room they share and the place they are looking to escape, the weather of their lives, the force that acts on the brothers. I have set out to explore Thatcher as a symbol, draw on the associations she prompts in people, and examine the atmosphere she brought down on Britain in the 1980s: and at a time when, across the arts, other organisations have been doing the same thing, it is interesting to ask why this is a relevant study to make now.

Investigating the legacy of Margaret Thatcher may seem, at first, to be a retreat from engaging with modern politics, but I believe exactly the opposite is taking place when contemporary artists turn to her. One way of understanding the present is to interrogate the past. In the more objective light of hindsight, patterns can be observed in earlier events which, if we pay them attention, can teach us about our now. I have written a play that happens in the shadow of Thatcher because I hope it can be an effective way of treating the shadow I myself live in – that of recession, social fragmentation, reduced opportunities for ordinary people and a state that is withdrawing from the people who need it like an ebb tide. By looking at another time when the tide was going our on our society, I hope I can provide new perspective and depth to our experience of what is happening in the world now: not only because Britain under Thatcher suffered similar violence from the state, but because the violence being done to us now is happening itself in the shadow of Thatcher. The politics she espoused, continued by the New Labour project of City-worshipping and brought back into the light by the policies of this present government, are acting on us every day; to examine her influence, the ideas she stands for, therefore seems vitally relevant to me.

Shakespeare recognised the value of history as a way of looking at society. In Hamlet, he examined a man who believed his family were damned because his uncle had married his father’s wife after his father’s death, an act outlawed in the Book of Common Prayer at the time Shakespeare was writing. This was a radical piece of political engagement, when one considers that Henry VIII, father of the monarch in the year of Hamlet’s writing, Elizabeth I, had done exactly the same thing, and it was only possible to make such comments through placing them in another situation. In this light, Margaret Thatcher comes to seem even more like a Shakespearean character: a figure from history, used to say something about our own time, allowing more to be spoken by putting the action at one remove.

MISSING runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre from Tuesday, January 31^st – Saturday, February 25^th, 19:30, Sunday performances 16:00. Book online through www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk, email boxoffice@tristanbatestheatre.co.uk or call 020 7240 6283.

Barney Norris explores the ways in which theatre can contribute to political debate.

I got into theatre for the politics. When I was fourteen someone bought me a copy of Simon Callow’s book, Being an Actor. In the book Callow described a company called Joint Stock which he had worked for. The company had made work with a political sensibility – a play called THE SPEAKERS based on a book by Heathcote Williams, about the people at Speaker’s Corner; a play called FANSHEN by David Hare that examined land reform in rural post-revolutionary China – and the way Callow told it, it seemed like the most vital, important thing anyone had ever done. I dreamed up a world in which theatre really mattered: where it wasn’t just a form of entertainment, which was all I saw around me in my own life, but the place where the most important points of the day were raised and interrogated. I imagined a world where theatre brought news, and was a cutting edge, a conscience. This world was the whirl of politically conscious theatre Callow seemed to have inhabited the seventies, and it was full of placards and touring theatre companies staving off bankruptcy from day to day.

As the years passed and I began to get involved with the theatre of today, I struggled to keep my dream alive. The companies that toured from factory to factory were thin on the ground in my world, if they existed at all – there weren’t as many factories to tour to, and the heart seemed to have gone out of the ‘poor theatre’ aesthetic that had seemed so glamorous to the fourteen-year-old me. I dreamed of having a company that could make that kind of work, but couldn’t find the artists who would be willing to join me.

In 2011, I was faced with another challenge. The Arab Spring saw revolution sweep across the globe, and in the face of the pace of events, David Hare, who had been at the forefront of everything I idealised about 70s theatre, said in an interview that events had left him feeling unsure of what to write. I felt the same about my own work – how could I say anything that mattered, that was relevant, in the face of a worldwide revolutionary movement? And moreover, how could I be a cutting edge in an age when the Internet and Twitter meant theatre could only ever reheat old news? I began to wonder whether the lack of enthusiasm for my four-men-in-a-van touring dream wasn’t to do with my not having met the right people, but with having the wrong idea. Perhaps an invasive theatre wasn’t what people needed now.

Next week, my play MISSING opens at the Tristan Bates Theatre. I finished the play while I was asking myself these questions about how theatre could be relevant in a political discourse – because I think now, at a time when our society and the whole world seems to be rocking, it is vital that theatre should be politically engaged – and this play is an attempt to use theatre to fulfil a different role to the one I used to imagine. MISSING doesn’t exist to shout at anyone – it seeks to give depth, and life, and perspective to a story we are all living already, to create a space in which an audience have room to reflect on the events pressing in on them in their daily lives.

I am not imagining an argumentative theatre any more. I am trying to imagine a portrait gallery, a place where pictures can be looked at that speak to you, not directly or argumentatively, but by virtue of their content. In imagining this gallery I thought of the plays of D.H.Lawrence and Franz Xaver Kroetz – exquisite portraits of people living their ordinary lives that passed no comment on the lives depicted, but asked us to pay them attention, quietly insisting these were important people we could learn from by putting them on a stage in front of us. I am also trying to imagine an echo chamber – a space that doesn’t offer any sound of its own, but allows an audience room to interrogate their own sounds, their own opinions. I thought of two great Royal Court plays, Richard Bean’s HARVEST and Jez Butterworth’s JERUSALEM, which both, for me, had interrogated Englishness without ever forcing the issue, or drawing a conclusion – they had presented a body of evidence, played it before an audience, and asked the thoughts in the auditorium to play back across them.

MISSING tells the story of two brothers, Luke and Andy, who are growing up sharing a bedroom under Thatcher in 1980s England. It’s my aim to make people think about their lives without shouting at them – to open a world, and let an audience explore it. The play tries to do something I think theatre is uniquely placed to do – giving depth to life, asking for people to fill in the blanks of a story, an argument, an idea. It’s subtler and quieter than the plays I used to dream of making – but I hope that means people might listen more closely. In a world where we all know the latest news, all the time, perhaps the most effective political role the theatre can play is to take an audience away from their lives for a short while, and ask them to think about what they’re doing with them.

MISSING runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre from Tuesday, January 31^st – Saturday, February 25^th, 19:30, Sunday performances 16:00. Book online through www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk, email boxoffice@tristanbatestheatre.co.uk or call 020 7240 6283.

Thatcher’s England, and Luke and Andy are facing the end of their childhoods. Luke is the first in the family to go to university; but as Andy looks for a way of escaping the life he was born into, he can’t stop thinking about his father.

Surrounded by mixtapes, guitars and ambitions, the two brothers discover how easy it is to get lost in a country that doesn’t look after its own.

Up In Arms are delighted to present Barney Norris’s second play, having toured his debut At First Sight in 2011. Alice Hamilton returns to direct.

Missing played at the Tristan Bates Theatre from January 31st – February 25th 2012 at 7.30pm, and 4pm on Sundays. To book tickets, visit www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk.

The Company

Luke – Rob Heaps

Andy – Joe Robertson

Director – Alice Hamilton

Writer – Barney Norris

Associate Producer – Nisha Oza

Lighting Designer – Miguel Vicente

Image Designer – Matthew Ward

Company Manager – Jake Anders

Reviews

**** ‘Pitch-perfect’ Time Out on Barney Norris’ At First Sight (tour / Latitude Festival)
‘Spellbinding’ Independent on Up In Arms’ Winterreise (various, inc. Tristan Bates Theatre)

Originally published on Culture Wars.

When something has been around for ever, there’s a danger that we cease to notice it. Schubert’s great song-cycle Winterreise is no exception. Even people who spend a good deal of their time at song recitals at the Wigmore Hall will find themselves thinking around the piece, rather than simply subjecting themselves to it. They’ll be comparing past performances, and, worse, they’ll be mesmerised by the performing manner they’ve become accustomed to – a manner quite unknown to Schubert himself. I remember Hermann Prey flinging his arms up in the air and shouting ‘Nooooo!’ when an audience had the presumption to applaud after the first part of Winterreise – applause tacitly invited by the layout of the programme. Ridiculous behaviour – on the part of the singer, who interrupted his own performance much more than the strangely appreciative audience had. I’ve played Winterreise more than any other piece, probably. David Wilson-Johnson and I recorded it on a piano of Schubert’s time back in 1984, in the poet’s order. (That’s a can of worms for another day.) And since then I’ve done it with Philip Langridge and John Tomlinson, taught it to dozens of students, lectured on it with horrid regularity, and given the London premiere of Franz Liszt’s version for solo piano. So I thought I knew the piece when, some years ago now, Thomas Guthrie asked me to accompany his version with three-quarter life-size puppet and animation. And the dramatic focus provided by the puppet transformed the experience for me. I found new things to enjoy – things I could take back into puppet-less performances with other singers. But the point of Guthrie’s presentation is not to impress his accompanist, nor even to make regular listeners uncomfortable. There’s a whole lot of people who don’t like song recitals. Bloke in fancy dress waving his arms about if you clap, foreign language, frankly rather dull. These are the people who really get Guthrie’s Winterreise. And they get it in the same way that Schubert’s friends got it, by total immersion. They knew all the poems backwards before Schubert ever set them to music. They had what we would recognise as book clubs where they discussed the latest poetry and read it to each other. When Schubert came along with a song, it fitted straight into their cultural world. There won’t be many book clubs devoting themselves to the poetry of Wilhelm Müller these days. But Guthrie’s theatrical presentation offers a new way to immerse yourself in the piece. We classical musicians should find other new ways to play other old music. Watch this space!

David Owen Norris will be accompanying Thomas Guthrie in performance of Winterreise at the Tristan Bates Theatre from 12 to 17 December 2012, in a staging also directed by Guthrie and featuring puppetry and animation. The production is presented by Up In Arms.

Aspiring rockstar, comedian, philosopher, heart-throb and Billy Joel fan Matthew Robin Fisher (the “Robin” is silent) comes to the Tristan Bates with an awe-inspiring night of alternative comedy, featuring dance, song, self-help, chat, gritty crime drama and the odd bit of outrageous self-delusion.

Tickets will go on sale shortly at www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk for £6 (£5 concessions) for Matt’s first ever solo show. We hope to see you there!

Having appeared at festivals across the UK and Europe, WINTERREISE returns to London with a week’s run at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden.

Here’s what the press have had to say:

‘A spellbinding evening’
The Independent

‘Magic filled the air’
Evening Standard

‘Vocally outstanding’
Opera Now on Thomas Guthrie

‘Possibly the most interesting pianist in the world’
Boston Globe and Mail on David Owen Norris

Monday 12th – Saturday 17th December 2011, 7.30pm
Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden, London

We hope to see you there for a very special winter treat.

THE COMPANY

Thomas Guthrie – Baritone and Director

David Owen Norris – Pianist

Sam Cave and Johan Lofving – Guitar

Mandarava – Puppetmaker

Peter Bailey – Artwork

Barney Norris – Producer

Alice Hamilton – Associate Director

With directorial support from John Adams

Last weekend I spent a day at the Shepherd’s Bush Festival, giving writing workshops in the Bush Theatre’s beautifully decked out tent. The subject of the day was beginnings. I think starting a play can be defeatingly difficult, and am always on the lookout for ways round the huge initial obstacles of choosing subject, character, setting and so on. The minute you sit down to write, it becomes clear there are so many stories in the world, and so little time, and the weight of the things it would be possible to write about becomes almost overwhelming if you think about it for too long.

We tried getting round this by drawing out what was going on in our subconscious a little, through free writing, and building a scene incrementally by asking questions (a person walks onto a stage: what shoes are they wearing? Try this sort of questioning, and before you know it you’re writing about the kind of person who wears old Converse trainers rather than, say, blue heels, and a lot of choices you might have had to make in the abstract have been taken off your hands). I’m a believer in the idea that we don’t necessarily have a great deal of control over what we write – we write best when we tap into our subconscious minds and explore the material there, when we’re responding creatively to our own lives. A good day’s writing often feels like sculpting – a character or line isn’t made up, it’s discovered somewhere in the back of your brain, and your job as a writer is to chip away at whatever’s on the surface of your mind to get to the idea waiting underneath the news headlines, or the arguments of the book you just put down. Free writing and questioning can expose those pre-existing scenes in you, as you take away the rational part of your brain, the part that thinks you ought to write about the future of the NHS or some pressing subject, and find that what really matters to you is the relationship between a father and a son, and that the state of the bed the father is lying in is the setting, not the subject.

My sense that there are more stories in the world than it would ever be possible to tell was only reinforced by the workshops. Everyone I worked with over the day showed me glimpses of a fascinating and strange world inside their heads, a different way of seeing that was unique and private to them, that it became possible for me to experience when they started to write it down. It’s amazing to realise that whole worlds you know nothing about are spinning and changing inside everyone you walk past in the street, all the time. I was grateful to the Bush for involving me in the day, because it was incredibly inspiring to engage with so many different possible plays: hopefully, all the possible playwrights I talked to will have found it inspiring as well, and it won’t be long before the play about the child trapped in a zorbing ball, or the play about the umbrella that floats alone through the parks of London, go on at the Bush.

Barney Norris is a playwright, under commission at the Bush and developing work at the Finborough, and works for the theatre company Out of Joint. His first play, ‘At First Sight’, was produced in the spring by Up In Arms (www.upinarms.org.uk).

I want to tell a story about an event in my life which helped direct me towards working in theatre. It was an unlikely piece of career advice, but it had a profound effect.

Three years ago, I was the victim of an assault. It was the last night of a play I was in, and I was out with the other three cast members. I was hit in the face with a ‘Diversions Ahead’ road sign, and I fell over.

I balled up and covered my face as best I could as the group kicked me in the head and the small of my back. Most of the kicks landed on my arms, forehead, cheeks and chin. One hit the jackpot of my nose though, and I experienced a flowering explosion of pain like I have never known before or since. I began to bleed pretty fast from my nose, and, because the expanding puddle of blood in front of my head didn’t stop the kicking, I tried going as still and silent as I could, rabbit-style. This worked. The group ran off, and I got up.

Interestingly, I was able to pretend to be unconscious because, apart from when you get hit in the nose, being kicked very hard in the head isn’t that painful. It was a real surprise to me – even as it was happening, I found myself thinking, I could take a lot of this. I suppose there isn’t actually that much bruisable flesh covering the skull – there aren’t many nerves to damage. And the brain has no nerves at all, so you can’t feel the damage being done as it rattles about, like a jelly in a blender.

After this encounter I was left with a fractured thumb, two swollen black eyes I couldn’t see out of for a few days afterwards, and trainer marks all over my face (for a week I sported a Nike tick on my forehead). I could insert my little finger up to the second joint in my left nostril (this doesn’t sound like much, but try it, it’s twice as far as you can go, I bet). For two years afterwards, I suffered occasional, incredibly sharp stabbing pains on the right side of my skull, from what I think was another fracture. To this day, I still get pains in my lower back. My face is also a slightly different shape – I have a Neanderthal indent where my nose meets my forehead, and a wider bridge.

I was also left feeling very sorry for my assailants. These people had nothing to fill their lives with but violence, and that seemed sad and wrong to me. I wanted to find a way to engage with the reasons they had beaten me up, to try and stop it happening again. Not just for the sake of people like me, but for them as well. These young boys out in the dark with nothing to do.

I made the decision that the most effective place I could try to engage with this problem was in a theatre. A play isn’t a direct way of solving anything, but in my own life, the place where I engaged most fruitfully with ideas and problems was in the dark of an auditorium. And I believed imaginative engagement was the most important work I could do to challenge this kind of violence. Because what’s missing from the debate over youth crime, I think, is sympathy.

You can’t divorce the actions of people from the conditions of their lives, so to confuse motiveless, mindless violence with causeless violence is an imaginative failure. When a crime is committed, we should look to understand and tackle the conditions that led to it. We should engage with the problem, because otherwise it won’t go away. Punishment can suppress it, but the problem stays. The perceived or actual social isolation of the young men who attacked me is, I believe, part of why I experienced that assault. They felt a distance between themselves and the world, a lack of sympathy, and that informed their violence. My assault was also the result, I think, of a failure of sympathy on their part – I don’t think you could hurt another person as I was hurt if you really knew what you were doing to the victim.

This is loosely the definition of psychopathy – an inability to empathise, to imagine – and I came to believe that what I saw in the society around me, where it failed, was a kind of psychopathy, an absence of sympathetic understanding. Just as psychopathy in an individual is considered a condition requiring treatment and support, I felt it required the same when manifested in society. Our ability to sympathise needed strengthening. I felt that a theatre was the best place to do this.

Theatre opens the world to us. Being a dialectic medium, it engages with ideas as questions, weaving points of view together to undermine ways of thinking, to make us challenge our preconceptions, to make us imaginative. In David Hare’s play Fanshen, a Chinese peasant shouts to a crowd, “Think! All think of your lives!” This, for me, is the challenge good theatre always sets down to its audience. It doesn’t advocate or argue – it asks us to sympathise, to empathise, and to engage with ideas we don’t examine in our everyday existence.

By working in theatre, I believed I could challenge the psychopathic tendency that exists in all of us, and tears through the fabric of our society more and more as we lose own capacity for sympathy. I had always thought of theatre as an extension of the dressing up game. After my assault, I began to believe that dressing up in the lives of others can help change the world. Because a society that drifts apart, whose members find themselves inhabiting different islands, has failed. So work needs to be done to hold us together.

Barney Norris

Last weekend I had the thrill of seeing my play go on at Latitude Festival. The play, At First Sight, had been produced on tour in the new year by Up In Arms, the theatre company of which I’m co-artistic director, and revived by another company in the spring, but getting it on at Latitude felt like a real coup, because the festival has such a unique and attractive personality, that I was delighted to be able to associate my work with.

A number of people I knew who had previously taken work to the festival talked about it as a highlight of their year, and I was interested to find out why it attracted such affection. Was it just the chance to let your hair down in a field with all your friends that made it such an eagerly anticipated weekend? Or was there something else about the atmosphere that made people speak so warmly of it?

The first thing that struck me when I arrived at Latitude was what a great idea the festival is. To walk through the site, or leaf through the festival programme, is enervating. The range of work you can discover across the weekend means Latitude offers a genuine immersion in new ideas and experiences. As a punter, it’s exciting to plan a weekend of wandering over the site, constantly stimulated by what’s on offer, enjoying the artistic equivalent of pick and mix. As an artist, it’s a chance to refresh and challenge your thinking, to expose yourself to ways of seeing you haven’t come across before, and work you would never normally go to. I find it’s all too easy in my day-to-day life only to go to shows, or read books, or listen to musicians I strongly suspect I’m going to like before they start: anyone who lives on a budget does it, we only have so much money to spend on theatre tickets, why would we spend it on something we don’t like the sound of? But at Latitude, where the programme in every area I spent time was strikingly eclectic, you find yourself watching work outside your artistic comfort zone, outside your taste. And, as is almost always the case when you expose yourself to new ideas, you get something from it.

Like going to Edinburgh or the National Student Drama Festival, then, Latitude is a potent mind expander. I wondered, looking round at the crowds of parents and children, the school kids who actually whooped when Simon Armitage read ‘Kid’ (‘is this my lighters in the air poem?’, he asked, and the boy in front of me dutifully got out his Zippo) and everyone else who made up Latitude’s impressively broad audience demographic, how many of us were bingeing on anything else while we were out here. I don’t think it was as many as I had expected. The drugs of choice were ideas and art, and around the site it was easier to buy a vegan falafel wrap than a beer. It was interesting: by removing, a little at least, the debauchery I associate with Edinburgh from the experience of being in the middle of hundreds of shows all happening at once, the organisers of Latitude demonstrated much more clearly what it is people are actually doing when they go to events like these. Without the complications of also being on a weekend-long bender, the only thing you can see everyone doing around you is removing themselves from their ordinary situation, getting away from the complexities and distractions of their lives, not to escape as you do on a beach holiday, but to plunge into something else. Out of their own contexts, people reeled from band to poet to play, getting drenched in art. I don’t know what it does to us all when we come back. Wakes up the nerve endings, probably, and makes us want a holiday on a beach. But it’s interesting, when we all feel so busy all the time, that there’s such a huge and eager audience wanting to go away and exhaust themselves with thinking and listening and seeing for a weekend.

It was fascinating to discover how different presenting theatre in a festival environment is from producing anywhere else. Before I got to Suffolk, I thought the difference I would find would be in the actual work staged. The plays I was going to see would be loud, bold, and filled with hooks in order to stand out alongside Bellowhead and Suede. But the difference wasn’t actually in the work – it was in the audience. Watching different acts around the site, it was clear that theatre at a festival plays to an audience who react very uniquely to what they’re seeing. People stop to watch a performance, and then, when they’ve had enough, move on to something else. It’s a far cry from being reminded to turn your phone off before the show starts. I wouldn’t claim it was the perfect environment to make theatre in, because I think some trains of thought need to be given time, and a lot of acting needs silence, but the atmosphere was brilliant at stripping away pretension and pretence, reminding me that theatre is in a market like everything else, competing for ears and eyes to play to.

I loved this. It seemed to me like a beautiful demonstration of the fact that all theatre is always about its audience. The suggestion that the passive theatregoer sits in the dark and does nothing while the play goes on doesn’t wash when they can walk away – you’re forced to accept that the play, as it existed in their head, finished when they left, no matter where you’d got to in the text. This is true when you present work in a purpose-built, dedicated theatre space as well, and it’s important to remember it: the only difference is that rather than going to look at something else, the bored theatre-goer in row J starts thinking of the shopping, or The Wire. So it’s even worse in a theatre – they can’t easily relieve the tedium by leaving. In that light, I suppose the unique selling point of theatre at Latitude is that the audience are liberated from the tyranny of established custom, of the house lights going down being the signal that they must now shut up and pay attention, as if theatre were a kind of school.

But while the onus was therefore on the different companies presenting work to be as riveting as possible, this challenge was met in very different ways. The most completely arresting piece of theatre I saw was Anthony Weigh’s Flooded Grave, which consisted of little more than the brilliant Mark Hadfield delivering a monologue by the light of a single torch.  I’d half expected the most successful shows to be made up of people in bright face paint doing star jumps. But of course, that would never have washed with an audience who had come all this way to be entertained. I think people go to the theatre to engage creatively with ideas, and think thoughts that don’t normally occur to them. If you take the thoughts and ideas away, and replace them with the theatrical equivalent of 3D, HD, red button exhibitionism, then your audience will go to the cabaret tent. People want a good story, and nothing else compensates for the lack of one. Star jumps can be brilliant when they help tell the story, but that’s the only reason they ever are. It doesn’t matter how good a performer is at doing them if they’re not leading us further into the maze.

I found my own show fascinating with regards to its audience. Over the course of its tech (which became a run because it wasn’t going wrong, and a crowd gathered to watch it) and performance, my play was seen by as many people at Latitude as saw it in the three weeks we toured it in the new year. It was incredibly inspiring to come across an audience so hungry for theatre that they were willing to sit and watch the work of a theatre company and a writer they didn’t know, just to see whether it was any good. No reviews, no recommendations or marketing, just human interest. I found it very moving to see all these people giving my work a try, their faces lit up by the reflected stage lights. Our performance happened on the Outdoor Stage in the middle of the night, and we contended with the sound of Paines Plough, the Bush, and any number of DJ sets nearby: but people sat and watched the play, or dropped in for a couple of minutes, and gave it their time and attention despite the distractions. It was inspiring to see that audiences like the two brilliant crowds we had are out there waiting and interested to see your work, if you can get it on the right stage to expose it to them. This is the opportunity that getting on at a major venue or event offers. I know the director of my play, Alice Hamilton, is an incredible talent, and that her work on this play left a real impression on people who saw it; that the two actors, Charles Reston and Roseanna Frascona, gave my play such vivid life, as did the composer Will Stuart; that the other artists and technicians we have worked with over the course of the show – Jake Anders, Matt Ward, Alex Dickens, Will Measham, Fly Davis and Chris Withers – made a visually beautiful piece; and that my brilliant producer, Liz Eddy, who made this transfer to Latitude happen, has marshalled an incredibly successful company and production. Thanks to Latitude, a ‘general public’ was now interested in finding that out as well.

But the clearest hint I got as to why the people who had been before got so excited when they talked about Latitude was found among the tents, not the stages. I felt very fortunate to be allowed to camp among the other performers at Latitude. It was as if I had been allowed to join, for a weekend at least, a very wonderful club. It’s a commonplace for people who get the chance to work in the arts to say they feel like they’re getting away with something, but from my tent, looking around at the banners of the different theatre companies around me, I felt I was getting away with things much more than the staff of the Lyric, or the National Theatre of Scotland, or the Bush. These were names I Googled, seasons I looked out for – and now I was being allowed to pitch my tent, literally, alongside them. It has to be an ambition of any playwright or theatre company to see their work presented alongside the great work of these companies, and to have achieved this with my first play is exhilirating.

What so interested me about looking at the performer’s campsite at Latitude was seeing all these different theatre companies brought physically together for a short time. It made me realise this isn’t the exception – when we make work and present it to the public, we’re always working in this larger context, joining the listings from every other theatre to offer up our way of interpreting the world. At Latitude, where the shows didn’t all open at 7:30, the sense of collective endeavour was enhanced because it was possible to see more of everyone else’s work; but the weekend served as a reminder to me that this is how things always work. Across every town in the country, there’s a gig vying for a crowd with a Noel Coward revival or an edgy piece of agit-prop in an empty shop. Latitude takes away all the buildings in between, so it’s easier to see how close everyone is to each other, but it’s only an illustration of what’s already the case. I wondered if that’s why people get so excited about taking work to Latitude. Camping a hundred metres from a theatre company that’s normally hundreds of miles away, you’re reminded that you’re involved in a collective endeavour, re-integrated into this larger society of people all wanting the same things, and renewed in your determination to be a part of this big artistic family.

Barney Norris

Liz Eddy (producer); Roseanna Frascona (actor playing Holly); Alice Hamilton (director); Barney Norris (writer); Charles Reston (actor playing Jack); Will Stuart (composer)…

And we’re excited to be working with Fly Davis, who is designing the show at Latitude, and Chris Withers, lighting designer and technician extraordinaire, who complete our team. Fly and Chris have worked together at Latitude before, and will ease the show’s path into this new kind of performance.

We’re proud to be emblazoned on the festival lineup poster, which you can see on the Latitude site: http://www.latitudefestival.co.uk/2011/.

We’ll be on just before midnight on the Outdoor Stage on Friday night, and we’re working with a brilliant designer named Fly Davis to make the performance a magical experience – current plans include candles, chocolate and fireworks… which we hope sounds racy enough for you.

Returning to their roles in Alice Hamilton’s production are Roseanna Frascona as Holly and Charles Reston as Jack, while Liz Eddy has masterminded our return to the stage as producer.

If you’re planning to be at Latitude, make sure you come and find us!

A selection of images from At First Sight, photography by Gordon Scammell.

“A highly original dramatization of the aftermath of a holiday romance, in which Norris’ script manages to lend an almost Proustian dimension to that depressingly familiar “why-won’t-he-call?” dilemma.” Oxford Theatre Review *****

“A dynamic, energetic performance which drew the audience in” Oxford Theatre Review ****

“At First Sight is blessed with some wonderfully evocative and descriptive narrative passages… the dialogue has a wonderfully dreamy, Beckettian poetic punch. Charles Reston and Roseanna Frascona are both excellent in the lead roles… Sound designer Will Stuart does a great job… Special mention must also go to lighting designer Alex Dickens, who creates a wonderfully moody ambience throughout… Alice Hamilton directs the play expertly, the romanticism and awkwardness of the two protagonists is subtle to the point of perfection.” Daily Info

Oxford Theatre Review

* * * * *

Barney Norris’ play opens with a scene that is pure Richard Curtis, as the attractive, young and just a little bit rah Holly and Jack strike up cutely stilted conversation on a balcony at an Austrian ski resort. However, just as you reach for the sick bucket, ‘At First Sight’ reveals itself for what it really is: a highly original dramatization of the aftermath of a holiday romance, in which Norris’ script manages to lend an almost Proustian dimension to that depressingly familiar “why-won’t-he-call?” dilemma. Holly is a shrill and spectacularly horsey only-child, Jack a smug musician who plays the piano at the ritzy Salzburg resort where she is holidaying. Charles Reston executes brilliantly the self satisfied and ever so slightly grating enthusiasm of an expat singing the praises of his new home, while the audience cannot help but warm to Roseanna Frascona’s wide-eyed daddy’s girl.

The two deal well with the challenging but rewarding script, which dramatizes the endless inner monologue that follows the end of a love affair. They revisit the circumstances and events of their romance with a series of tableaux, through which they are ably directed by Alice Hamilton, re-staging their meetings and conversations over and over again until they pull apart their memories to a confused abstraction. They create their own narratives through a satisfying mix of almost poetic observations, and of the kind of clichés which we cannot help but apply to our love lives. As they turn over the past, Jack and Holly often trail off, or stare into the middle distance. This uneasy air is coupled with their frustrated attempts to stabilize the image of each other by recalling who said what, when they said it, and how they met, to add an unreal, distant quality to what we see unfolding, which is perfect for transposing our memories to the stage. Its success pivots mainly on a neat inversion of expectations; whereas audiences often have a story acted out for them and are left to guess about characters’ motivation, here is a play in which thought process is everything and action a distant past relayed through allusion and memory.

It speaks to the power of Norris’ writing that characters that are intentionally rather vapid and dull become so appealing; despite the added difficulty in staging something so psychological and abstract as an exploration of memory, by the end we become well and truly invested in Holly and Jack’s really quite believable relationship, and there is a definite sense of tragedy as they are ultimately forced to accept the inaccessibility of their past. At only 45 minutes, ‘At First Sight’ is certainly no epic voyage of the mind, but three-quarters of an hour is all it takes to become absorbed by this sometimes funny, often innovative, and extremely smart play.

Joe Horton

* * * *

At First Sight tells the story of two lovers, Jack and Holly, who reminisce and recount their experiences in love in the 45 minutes of the play. Obviously this duration is incredibly short, but I would argue against anyone who says that such a compact performance leaves one wanting. Compact describes the play well: it was a dynamic, energetic performance which drew the audience in, an intimacy and engagement which is compounded by the size of the Burton Taylor Studio itself.

The staging is minimal: evidently Norris planned to fill the performance-space with the personalities of and the interactions between the characters, which of course if ambitious of any author, but is nevertheless rewarding if it works well: which, for the most part, it did in At First Site. Two chairs is all it takes for Reston and Frascona to become the reminiscing Jack and Holly (although we are never told their names), and Frascona especially fills her role well, making use of the intimacy of the studio by engaging powerfully with the audience. The idea that the play records “memories looping back through one another as they try to share a past they can never return to”, as the program puts it, is stimulating to watch. The use of music and lighting to introduce the memories which are played out in front of us is subtle, but effective, and the way in which the two actors play out scenes as their characters try to recall them is commendable: the small space of the studio is by no means a restriction. The 45 minutes goes quickly, yet because you are so engaged with the two characters, and because of the fluid nature of the narrative, you do not feel bored.

Overall, the performance was enjoyable: the actors engaged well with the audience, and the lovers depicted were convincing, as multi-dimensional and layered as the reminiscences and ideas that they played out. Norris does well to create this nuanced idea of romance, and the effects that distance from this romance has on the lover are played out clearly and effortlessly. Finally, Up In Arms productions says that it wants to leave every audience “up in arms”: I wouldn’t say that this was my exact reaction, but the play poses provoking questions on the nature of love in an enjoyable production that leaves you satisfied.

Joe Nicholson

Daily Info

“At First Sight” is the first play by Oxford University graduate Barney Norris. Written in 2008, it’s been doing the rounds at theatres throughout the country since, winning the Drama Association Of Wales’s Act Play Competition in 2010.

The play tells the story of two young people, Jack and Holly, who cast their minds back to a time they spent in Salzburg. Jack is earning his money playing a piano in the bar of a hotel, whilst Holly is down for a skiing trip with her parents. Jack is lower middle class, whilst Holly is very much upper middle class; “proper English” as Jack opines in one scene. The opening scene, in which Jack lights up a cigarette and offers one to Holly, only for her to initially decline and eventually succumb to the wicked pleasures of a nicotine hit, is repeated thrice in the production, seemingly for dramatic effect. The third recap is extremely poignant; to elaborate further would ruin the story somewhat, so it is probably best left alone at this point in time. The play relies on flashback, with both characters recounting the moment via the medium of narration.

“At First Sight” is blessed with some wonderfully evocative and descriptive narrative passages. The choreography throughout is excellent; the aforementioned repeated scene in which Jack offers Holly a cigarette is pure film noir, whilst the dialogue has a wonderfully dreamy, Beckettian poetic punch. Charles Reston and Roseanna Frascona are both excellent in the lead roles, displaying a quiet intensity and impresssive feel for narrative language which will surely guarantee them both a future in the world of acting. Sound designer Will Stuart does a great job; firework displays, classical music and spoken word passages are all brought vividly to life, skillfully avoiding the technical hazards which can sometimes mar productions in smaller venues like the Burton Taylor Studio. Special mention must also go to lighting designer Alex Dickens, who creates a wonderfully moody ambience throughout, and image designer Matthew Ward, whose visual flair makes for some great dramatic scenes. Alice Hamilton directs the play expertly, the romanticism and awkwardness of the two protagonists is subtle to the point of perfection.

In my opinion, the play’s only fault is that it’s too damn short! I would have liked to see some more of the underlying tension that pervades the two lovers throughout; with leads as good as this, 45 minutes is not nearly enough! Although the repeated scene is, admittedly, extremely well executed and full of sexual tension, I personally think the second rehash could have been replaced with more of the evocative dialogue and doomy sense of longing that pervades the rest of the play, just to level the proceeedings out a little. Apart from these minor quibbles, this is a lovely piece of theatre which I would particularly recommend to married and non-married couples. Great stuff.

Sean Diamond

We’re delighted to discover how good the title is for by-line puns.

A First Sight of a Bright Talent

Francesca Wade, Cherwell newspaper

‘At First Sight, his first play, has been four years in the making – Oxford graduate and last year’s Drama Officer Barney Norris was always shy about showing his ‘awful work’ to anyone. He needn’t have been so modest.’

‘Norris describes the play as ‘simply, a love story. It’s also a play about memory – the attempt and the impossibility of getting back to a moment – how people live on multiple levels all at once in their heads. But at its core it’s about two people meeting and parting, in a great place’. That place is Salzburg, which Norris visited 6 months before starting At First Sight, and he calls the play a ‘love letter to that city’. ‘In a way it’s the play’s central subject – the question of what they fall in love with – each other or the moment. And the moment is Salzburg.’ The script is brimming with beautifully evocative images of the mountains where Jack lives and Holly has gone to ski. The title brings to mind the clichéd ideal of love at first sight, but, as Norris says, ‘love at first sight always implies the need for a second look.’ The many subtle contradictions in their memories lead us to question the truth of what we see, and bring out very poignantly the subjectivity of memory.’

‘Clever, moving, beautifully written and certainly a must-see.’

At First Sight: Worth a Second Glance?

Tes Asfaw, Oxford Student

‘At First Sight… is about two characters recollecting their first meeting and a relationship that never was. Norris said: “It is an attempt at getting back to a point which is slightly slippery as memory keeps defracting.” At First Sight plays with the accuracy of memory.’

‘… powerful moments of inflection, for example when Holly reveals the double-edged sword of love at first sight: “It’s so easy to fall into the trap of fumbling after a thing that is gone, an image that has already faded because its time has passed.”’

To read interviews with Barney and Alice is full, go to:

http://www.cherwell.org/content/11226

http://oxfordstudent.com/2011/01/13/at-first-sight-worth-a-second-glance/

http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/leisure/entertainments/8788801.Playwright_sets_his_sights_on_success/

Here are a selection of photos from the rehearsals.

In addition to confirming our cast, we can confirm much of our creative team. The lighting designer will be Alex Dickens, the sound designer and composer will be Will Stuart, the image designer is Matthew Ward and the company manager will be Jake Anders.

We are pleased to welcome back Roseanna, Alex, Matthew and Jake, who have all worked with Up In Arms before, and excited to be working with Charles and Will for the first time.

Finally, we can also confirm that a playtext of At First Sight will be available to buy at performances. The play will be published by the Drama Association of Wales.

The other work has been in making a context for our text – discussing and developing a set of references for the world of the play. This process has taken us from Whitman to The Big Lebowski, and, alongside accent and music work, has been helping us in our attempt to get to the heart of what Annie has written.

Getting to work with Peter Gill is an extraordinary privilege for me, and as his assistant I am having a fantastic time watching him work with the actors. It’s also wonderful having three such talented people playing the parts. I haven’t assisted on a production before, and I feel very lucky to have the chance to be involved with ‘The Aliens’.

Ezra Pound once wrote that ‘any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.’ With this, he laid down an arresting challenge, which I wish to consider in relation to a subject I am currently much concerned with – the revival of old plays.

I am currently directing a production of Hamlet (Wadham Chapel, 8^th week), and the need to ‘make it new’, as Pound termed it, has been a central concern in rehearsals. A problem that increasingly besets Shakespeare as he is buried ever deeper in hagiography (to which this, hypocritically, adds) is that he is very, very well known. Surprise is a difficult thing to generate when everyone knows the ending – the twists and turns of the narrative can’t be relied upon alone. And yet surprise intensifies emotion; and dramatic tension, the gathering momentum that coheres a play, is heightened by uncertainty. Surprise makes for good plays. It’s obviously a good thing that Shakespeare is widely read; but it causes a problem for productions of him, that exists entirely outside of the text – a conditioning culture that perhaps cannot be as easily excited by Hamlet as they might be if they could encounter it without preconditionings.

My production is interested in this problem. We are doing Hamlet, one of the most famous, widely known and revived plays in English, because it’s brilliant; but we also want to stage a beginning, an invention, a discovery. Of course, we’re engaged in a slightly different process to the one Pound was writing about, because revival is re-imagination, not original composition. But Shakespeare wasn’t. He was writing something strikingly new. To be faithful to that spirit, we have tried during rehearsal to draw something provocative out of the text. In the firm belief that Shakespeare is bigger than all of us, that you can find almost anything in him if you look for it, we have tried to pattern our production with surprises.

In a sense, this Hamlet wants to challenge: by cutting characters, re-imagining sequences and generally translating the play into what will hopefully resemble a distinct version, it wants to get a response. But all this sacrilege is just a way of being faithful to a spirit that I believe lies behind this play, which after all is about the frightening, and the unknown. The version of Hamlet I am putting together is a love letter to a text far larger than any production of it: it’s just why I love Hamlet. If you come to the play, I will be pleased if you like it, and find it fresh; but I’ll probably be glad if you disagree with it as well, because then, we’ll have prompted you into determining why and how you love this enormous, marvellous play. I don’t think anyone should ever put on ‘old plays’; I think that the only way theatre works is if it’s part of a live conversation, between the bodies on stage and the minds in the audience: if it’s a beginning, an invention, a discovery.

Barney Norris

Franz Xaver Kroetz is Germany‘s most frequently performed living playwright. He was born in Munich in 1946. His father died when he was fifteen. In the 1960s he attended drama school, and worked as a banana cutter, a truck driver, and an orderly in a mental hospital to support himself. In the 1970s he became an active member of the German Communist Party, and in 1971 attained celebrity when productions of two of his plays were disrupted by neo-fascists, causing the German police to place guards around the theatre. His plays in the 1970s depict men and women who have been reduced to silence by their social condition, and are remarkable for their unflinching realism – characters use the toilet onstage, take showers, make love. In the 1980s, Kroetz was introduced to America, several of his plays being translated and produced off Broadway. In 2003, Through the Leaves, written in 1976, was translated by Anthony Vivis and staged at the Southwark Playhouse and the Duchess Theatre, with Ann Mitchell and Simon Callow playing the two roles of Martha and Otto.

Approaching Kroetz is difficult; his style might be Beckettian, his silences Pinteresque, his realism reminiscent of D.H.Lawrence – but that doesn’t say very much at all, in that it says too much. What is attractive about Kroetz, in fact, is not the undoubted literary achievement of his plays, but the root cause behind them. Through the Leaves was written at a time when German communism had extended, in a few extreme cases, into terrorism: the Red Army Faction, formerly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, were at large in Germany and committing violent murders in the name of freedom, and Kroetz, like many of his communist contemporaries, became a target for neo-fascist groups. Kroetz would leave the communist party in 1980, having drawn disapproval for his unheroic characters; but at this time, he was an avowedly political playwright, a man writing out of his beliefs and convictions, whose plays depicted the faults and weaknesses of a society he wanted to reform. A contemporary of David Hare, Howard Brenton and David Edgar, his work is arresting and fascinating as a result of the passions that motivated it, the idea behind it. Kroetz’s profile in England should be much higher: his plays deserve wider recognition for their passionate and moving intensity.

Barney Norris

For some weeks now, I have been rehearsing a play which has attracted me for several years; ever since I read Simon Callow’s Being An Actor, I have been fascinated by the impact that David Hare’s play Fanshen had on the theatre of its day. In documenting his time with Joint Stock, the company run by Bill Gaskill and Max Stafford Clark, Callow repeatedly used the most intriguing verb: the company, when he came to them some years after the first production of the play I am now rehearsing, were ‘fanshened’.

It’s a verb used frequently in the play itself: to quote the first scene, ‘literally the word fanshen means to turn the body or to turn over.’ I became interested in the overturning in the theatre that had been caused by this account of one of history’s greatest ‘fanshens’; the upheavals of China after the second world war which are the subject of the play.

It is a commonplace that, in the seventies, the theatre was enervated by the radical left; but the impact of this single play on that decade is extraordinary. It went like this: while rehearsing this play, that took as its subject the obsessive self-examination of the Chinese land reform movement, Bill Gaskill commented that it would be wonderful to run a company in the same manner as Hare had imagined: not to have the directors bitching about the actors and the actors about the directors behind their backs, but to make every decision as a group, to self-criticise, to redistribute power and democratise the process.

So the Joint Stock method was born. Each member of Joint Stock had an equal say; everyone helped decide, as Max Stafford Clark explained it to me, ‘whether the actors went in the van or were given money for train fares’. Plays were collaboratively researched by the company, to be drawn together by a writer. The method profoundly influenced the practice of theatre companies in the coming decades. And it came not from a manifesto, but from a play: the dominant practice of theatre in the Wilson and Thatcher eras was drawn from fiction. (A fiction drawn from a true story, admittedly; but for Joint Stock, rehearsing Fanshen in 1970s England, the events of 1940’s China would have seemed very distant as they drew this idea from the text).

While rehearsing this play, I have found myself exploring a piece of theatrical history. Fanshen ‘fanshened’ its actors and its audiences; it overturned the theatre of its day. In a very small way we are trying to see how it did that. It is enervating to be in the middle of an experiment; student theatre ought to be about trying things and testing out ideas. With Fanshen, we are engaged in overturning ourselves; turning ourselves into ideas and intentions; asking questions of one another, and of our audience.

Fanshen itself was enormously influential as a production: to the extent that, for ten years after the first performance, an actor at the Edinburgh Fringe could pick up a chair, walk across the stage saying ‘I am a Chinese peasant’, and get a laugh. Joint Stock became the ‘Complicite’, the ‘Kneehigh’ of their day. We hope that the play which inspired them will be as relevant today as it was in 1975. When I met David Hare to discuss the play, he drew an interesting parallel. ‘When the play was first produced,’ he recalled, ‘it was at a time when people were very disillusioned with the government; not just the party of government at the time, but the system as a whole. A lot of people left the theatre saying: wouldn’t it be nice if we could interrogate our leaders like that? And it will be interesting to see if people respond similarly, when you do it.’ There has not been a lot of overturning recently in England.

Barney Norris

Up In Arms are pleased to announce their next production, directed by Alice Hamilton (The Taming of the Shrew, West Side Story) and touring in January – February 2011.

CAST:

Jack – Charles Reston

Holly – Roseanna Frascona

CREATIVE TEAM:

Director: Alice Hamilton

Writer: Barney Norris

Lighting Designer: Alex Dickens

Sound Designer and Composer: Will Stuart

Image Designer: Matthew Ward

Company Manager: Jake Anders

Stage Manager: Will Measham

Production Support: Liz Eddy and Sam Basinger

Tour dates are in full below (book through the venues or email director@upinarms.org.uk with any enquiries):

Thursday 20th – Saturday 22nd January 2011, Burton Taylor Studio (www.oxfordplayhouse.com), 7.30pm – tickets £10/£8.

Thursday 27th – Friday 28th January 2011, Studio Theatre, Salisbury (www.studiotheatre.org.uk), 7.30pm, tickets £7.

Tuesday 1st – Sunday 6th February 2011, Etcetera Theatre, Camden (www.etceteratheatre.com) tickets £10/£8.

REVIEWS (for more click here)

“Like the fleeting romance it observes, ‘At First Sight’ is the epitome of short and sweet.” Time Out ****

“A highly original dramatization of the aftermath of a holiday romance, in which Norris’ script manages to lend an almost Proustian dimension to that depressingly familiar “why-won’t-he-call?” dilemma.”Oxford Theatre Review *****

“A dynamic, energetic performance which drew the audience in” Oxford Theatre Review ****

“At First Sight is blessed with some wonderfully evocative and descriptive narrative passages… the dialogue has a wonderfully dreamy, Beckettian poetic punch. Charles Reston and Roseanna Frascona are both excellent in the lead roles… Sound designer Will Stuart does a great job… Special mention must also go to lighting designer Alex Dickens, who creates a wonderfully moody ambience throughout… Alice Hamilton directs the play expertly, the romanticism and awkwardness of the two protagonists is subtle to the point of perfection.” Daily Info

At First Sight went on to transfer to Latitude Festival 2011, when the original production team was joined by Fly Davis and Chris Withers.