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.
On the edge of Salisbury Plain, Edie’s memories begin to slip, as her husband, Arthur, stubbornly tends the land that has been in the family for three generations but is not wanted by the fourth, Stephen, a Swindon insurance broker. Unable to fund professional help for his parents either at home or in a “home”, the son finds, from an online startup, Kate, a university graduate drifting between professions, as a sort of end-of-life au pair.
The preoccupation in Norris’s plays and novels with time and ageing and England invoke Philip Larkin, and Visitors alarmingly dramatises the poet’s fears in Aubade about lives becoming trapped in “wrong beginnings”. Edie laments that the young don’t know “which life to choose” and the old are haunted by having completed the wrong one. Each of the characters feels that they could have done or might yet do something else.
Norris’s dialogue exposes lives in a line or even a word. Edie, shown a recent photograph of a rarely seen teenage granddaughter, remarks how much the girl resembles her mother. Stephen’s reply, “Scowling,” blares marital tensions. Parent-son dynamics are ingeniously shown in a running gag about how – and how well – each tells jokes.
A marvellous cast radiate the pain of things said and unsaid across the years. Tessa Bell-Briggs’ Edie agonisingly embodies the stage of dementia in which someone knows what they are losing. Christopher Ravenscroft’s Arthur wears twinkly optimism to shield a less kind man inside. As Kate, Nathalie Barclay’s perky wish to be accepted into this home hints at rejection from others. Patrick Toomey’s Stephen chillingly takes his parents’ lives and marriage as an affront to his own.
A play’s first major revival indicates whether it is heading for the remainder table or the repertoire: it’s the latter trajectory, on this evidence, for Visitors.
At The Watermill theatre, Newbury until 22 April
