Play Talk: Barney Norris on helping load the van and writing about England's longing for meaning

In her five-star review of Barney Norris's Visitors, Fiona Mountford wrote that "it’s difficult to decide where to start in listing what Norris gets right". Since then, he's published a novel which has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain) and has a new play as part of Nicholas Hytner's opening season at the Bridge Theatre (Nightfall, opening next April). Before then, his play While We're Here, about old lovers meeting again, is the first play to be performed in the Bush Theatre's new studio space.

What was the first play to make you want to write plays?

Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans was profoundly important for me. I was growing up in Salisbury, a quiet place whose theatre served up pretty conservative fare, and Max Stafford-Clark’s company Out of Joint visited with this show that was utterly and electrifyingly about our world, our now. I was turned onto the form, really, by that show and the idea that theatre could engage with contemporary reality.

What was your background to becoming a playwright?

I’ve always just tried very hard to be involved in every aspect of the theatre I could get stuck into, and have found some success in some areas, and less in others. Writing is the area where I’ve found the greatest appetite for me to be in the band, so that’s become my principle focus, but I’m also a failed actor who has directed here and there, produces several shows a year and helps load the van at the end of the evening – I’ll do anything to be near this ritual.

What’s the hardest play you’ve ever written?

My last play Echo's End, at Salisbury Playhouse, was a fascinating challenge. I was working away from the established collaborative network I’ve developed through my company Up In Arms, writing a play set in the past, for a large stage and a larger company than I’ve previously worked with. So much of that was new ground, so I found that a really exhilarating battle with my own technical limitations and inexperience.

Which brought you the most joy?

My first full-length play Visitors was a particularly joyous occasion, because it had the most extraordinarily disproportionate impact in relation to our resources and expectations.

Which playwrights have influenced you the most?

When I try to write a play I think of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller. The American and Irish theatres are inspirational because they have made their drama out of the lives of ordinary, working people, and by doing so found the theatre a role in public life as a means of articulating the experience of the many. To over-generalise, I’d say that the theatre in England has predominantly oscillated between studying the wealthy, and studying the ‘other’ (the wealthy are an ‘other’ as well, of course, but they’ve also made up most of the theatre audience of England since its revitalisation in the late nineteenth century, so it’s a slightly different case of playing to the gallery rather than projecting new realities into the auditorium). English theatre is more frequently a device for imagining other worlds than looking at our own. Lots of exceptions to that on all fronts, of course! Lastly, I’d say that these days the greatest living writer in any medium surely has to be Athol Fugard. Every aspect of his practice matters to me, his subjects, his treatment of them, his ensemble practice, everything.

What is your favourite line or scene from any play?

DH Lawrence, A Collier's Friday Night – ‘as much happens for you as for other people’. The beginning of everything valuable that writing has had to say in Britain in the last century.

What’s been the biggest surprise to you since you’ve had your writing performed by actors?

Everything about that experience is constantly surprising, and thrilling, and magical – it’s the greatest privilege of the job, watching how an actor meets a role.

What’s been your biggest setback as a writer?

It’s actually very hard to think of one, if I’m honest. I don’t think anything has happened to me that hasn’t made my work better – all the rejections I’ve had have allowed the work to develop further, and me and my company to develop further.

And the hardest lesson you’ve had to learn?

I’m sure it comes as a shock to each and every creative artist, the first time they realise they’re not actually a visionary genius for whom the seas are going to part, in order to allow them to write plays for the Theatre Downstairs till the day they die! And that they will actually have to work, and work harder than everyone else, to get anything done at all.

What do you think is the best thing about theatre? And the worst?

I love everything about the theatre, except for the fact that you’re very, very lucky if you see more than one piece of work a year that actually matters to you. Last year I saw two – Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour and Les Blancs – and that was wonderful.

What’s your best piece of advice for writers who are starting out?

I’d refer to Lawrence again. This is a slight paraphrase, but his advice was to ‘bite down and don’t let the bastards shake you off till the money starts flowing like blood’.

Are there any themes and stories you find yourself re-visiting with your plays?

I think it’s a relatively established fact in mathematics that if one is going to have an idea, one has it pretty early, and once the brain’s formed, the potential for revolutionary new concepts has receded. I think that resonates in the field of creative writing – everyone in the world does or does not develop an image that haunts and preoccupies them relatively early in life, which some go on to seek to articulate through writing, of which a few get some of their work in front of the public, of which a very few say something interesting, of which a few in each generation manage to then develop that image they’ve burnished and brought to the light so that they remain valuable to us as routes into the human subconscious throughout their lives. That’s a long way of saying – we have a song we sing in Up In Arms that goes ‘one play, he’s only got one play…’

Are you on Twitter? Do you find it a help or a hindrance as a writer?

I am. I will say frankly that I detest it, and the self I project through it, but my publicist has flatly refused my requests to come off it, so that’s that. And I run an account for Up In Arms because if I could have sold a single additional ticket through doing something else I didn’t try for one of our shows, I wouldn’t forgive myself, and I wouldn’t deserve the support of the Arts Council. We have to work hard and try everything, or we don’t deserve anything. But I think social media across the board is a highly effective lubricant we apply to the endless race to the bottom that constitutes the majority of our cultural and public life.

Why did you write While We're Here?

I wanted to explore the way that people long for meaning in England now; to articulate a particular strata of unremarked life on our islands; to make another show with my friends and collaborators, and offer up something else to our audience; and to draw attention to the terrible loneliness inflicted on the weakest in society by the way our state is set up to support them.

How do you spend opening night?

I pace around feeling grateful and afraid.

What’s the best play you’ve seen this year?

I’ve actually only seen about half a dozen shows this year so far, because I’ve made three of my own and been on a book tour of Germany, so I’m never around. I’d rather say that I’m still living in the afterglow of Les Blancs last year, really, I’m not ready to transfer my affections to anything else yet. It was so utterly wonderful.

What’s your favourite place to watch theatre in London?

I think there are very many wonderful places. I can’t wait to see the first show in the Bridge Theatre though, Nick Hytner and Nick Starr’s new theatre, that’s going to be very special.

What other art forms do you love when you’re not in a theatre?

I’m much more of a reader than a theatregoer, really, I read a great deal. All my parents are musicians, so music has always been very important to me, and I’m getting more and more interested in visual art as I start to develop some of the tools to read it. The more interest you take in any form, the more rewarding it gets, I find. Except the ones you actually work in, where you end up hating anything because you know how all of it’s done! I can only love theatre when it makes me wonder how on earth they’re doing it these days. Pete Postlethwaite’s Lear, or whatever, those moments that aren’t about technique. (Not that his technique wasn’t incomparable, but people who saw that performance will know what I mean).

If the Prime Minister said they were abolishing the theatre tomorrow, what would you do?

This is only conceivable in a very different society, so it’s hard to engage with the question. Too many variables.

While We're Here is at the Bush Theatre until May 27; bushtheatre.com