Visitors, Bush Theatre - theatre review: 'Parts this finely written are manna for actors'

Writer Barney Norris’s first full-length drama is a magnificent piece of writing that captures with such perception the slippage between different generations

Visitors: Robin Soans as Arthur, Linda Bassett as Edie in the Bush's production of new play Visitors by Barney Norris / Picture: Alastair Muir

Alastair Muir

Fiona Mountford11 December 2014

We don’t see many plays on our contemporary stages that address the subject of ageing, and most certainly not plays that brim with the humanity, insight, wit and pathos of Visitors. It’s a triumph of an achievement and the fact that it is 27-year-old Barney Norris’s first full-length drama makes it even more remarkable. After a sell-out run at the Arcola this spring and a well-deserved place on the shortlist for this year’s Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright, it now makes a welcome return.

Arthur (Robin Soans) and Edie (Linda Bassett) are long-married seventysomethings, jovial and contented and adapting, with some grace, to the gradual privations of old age. They live a secluded life on their family farm on the edge of Salisbury Plain but hard times are ahead, as Edie’s mind is starting to go. It has cloudy spells followed by clear but their quasi-estranged son Stephen (Simon Muller) is worried enough to have arranged for live-in help in the form of confused young graduate Kate (Eleanor Wyld).

It’s difficult to decide where to start in listing what Norris gets right. He captures, for example, with such perception the slippage between different generations, with our changing expectations of what we want — and deserve — from life. Stephen, an awkward bundle of insecurity, rejected farming in favour of middle-management in life insurance; he desired more than his parents’ ways and gentle Christianity but has ended up with so much less.

Parts this finely written are manna for actors, and this quartet — not least the terrific Bassett — are note-perfect in Alice Hamilton’s fluidly confident production. The dynamics between the four are so deftly handled, with every relationship clearly differentiated by Norris. Arthur, tirelessly loving towards his wife, becomes monosyllabic in the company of his son, who in turn tries hard but somehow manages to misjudge each interaction. Stephen looks completely ill-at-ease in the house he grew up in, whereas Kate, warm and direct, is instantly at home.

This is a quietly — but utterly — magnificent piece of writing. Be a visitor to it.