A major new UK revival of Barney Norris’ award-winning play Visitors will run at The Watermill Theatre Friday 31 March until Saturday 22 April 2023. It will also be directed by Barney Norris (The Wellspring – Royal and Derngate, Nightfall – The Bridge Theatre), who’s an Associate Artist at The Watermill. His tender portrayal of a family on the cusp of major change, learning to live and love with dementia, is set in his beloved rural Wiltshire.
Edie’s mind is starting to falter and Arthur’s legs aren’t what they were but, from the comfort of their armchairs, they dive into a kaleidoscope of memories from their life together. In their sleepy farmhouse at the edge of Salisbury Plain, they await the arrival of a young visitor and a reunion that will expose a family whose closeness is fraying at the seams.
A life-affirming tribute to love and gratitude for a life well-lived, Visitors premiered at the Arcola Theatre in March 2014. Following a national tour and a transfer to the Bush Theatre later that year, it was selected by Henry Hitchings for the Evening Standard and Mark Lawson for the Guardian as one of the best productions of 2014, and won the Critics’ Circle Award and the Off WestEnd Award for Most Promising Playwright for Norris. It was also nominated the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best New Play Award, and the Evening Standard Theatre Awards Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright, and Best New Play from the Offies Awards
Barney Norris is an award-winning playwright and acclaimed author of novels Undercurrent, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain and The Vanishing Hours.
Barney Norris said, “Visitors is a story about love, the way that love shapes a life, the way that love extracts a toll, the way that love defines us. It’s also a play about people clinging on to ways of life, trying to make the world work for them as it seems to be trying to fall apart. And a play about what it’s like to live in the country. I wrote it fifteen years ago, a love song to the world I come from, and with this production I am bringing it home. The play’s set outside the north Wiltshire village of Pewsey, and the Watermill, I think, is the closest producing theatre to the play’s actual landscape. When Paul Hart, the Watermill’s artistic director, asked if I’d like to do it there, I jumped at the chance.