Young authors’ work often deals with youth, due to the solipsism of early adulthood and writing school injunctions to self-dramatise. So one startling aspect of Visitors, at its premiere in 2014, was the mid-20s Barney Norris creating searingly detailed and compassionate portraits of a septuagenarian couple fretting about paths chosen and imposed.
Since that debut, Norris has produced four novels, including The Vanishing Hours, and numerous theatrical pieces, most recently The Wellspring, an affecting speech-and-music memoir. High on any list of the best younger British writers, he now, with a self-directed revival of Visitors, sets the sometimes stressful test of whether a first work has lasted.
