James Norton: I spoke to marriage counsellors to play struggling couple in Belleville

James Norton told today how he and co-star Imogen Poots spent time with a marriage counsellor as they prepared to play the troubled young couple in the Donmar Warehouse’s new show.

The cast of Belleville and its director Michael Longhurst also visited the trendy Paris suburb where the play is set and stayed in an apartment block like the one the characters live in.

Norton, 32, said: “They were very good at The Donmar, they brought in marriage counsellors, experts in co-dependency, experts on lying and we talked a lot about the place from which these guys struggle.

“We talked a lot about how they were millennials and they are representative of people who have quite a tough lot.

“Basically the reason they are in the trouble they are in is the pressure from their parents, their teachers and every-one around them who has fed them this narrative that they have to have this particular life, money, a job, a house like their parents had and previous generations felt entitled to, but of course the world is different now.”

The play centres around a self-obsessed young American couple living a dream life in Paris as their relationship sours and descends into tragedy — but Norton said the pair were “not villains”.

Describing the cast’s trip to Belleville, he added: “It is like Peckham I guess, it’s that very fast-gentrifying part of town but also has a very firm identity so it hasn’t been totally overrun and it’s got immense character.”

The actor — soon to be seen in BBC crime drama McMafia — said “the field trip”, where they visited the local café and took photographs of the views across the city from the flat, allowed them to “build a world around our tiny little microcosm”.

Poots, 28, said: “It was also great bonding experience, you’re about to work with people on such an intense scale so it is such a gift to feel so relaxed around people outside of the actual subject matter.” The actress, who was making only her second ever professional stage appearance, said the intensity of the play, with only four actors in a one-room set, was part of the attraction. “You wonder why would you bother doing anything else if it is not going to terrify you?” she added.

Norton, whose last West End appearance was playing another troubled young American in Bug, said he had not intended to take on such a “similar” role so soon: “They are the ones, the characters on the extreme fringes, which are the most interesting and you learn the most from them and they take an audience on the most extreme and rewarding journey.”