Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris shares some of his current reading and research focuses.

I read a couple of hundred books a year; in the last week, Michael Kaiser’s The Art of the Turnaround, a memoir that’s also a how-to guide for revitalising struggling arts organisations, has inspired me; Damian Hannan’s Rural Exodus and Michael McCarthy’s Like A Tree Cut Back were interesting bedfellows; Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues allowed me to spend more time thinking about a favourite preoccupation of mine, the social function and meaning of the storyteller; Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library, a kind of minor-key sequel to his larger, more optimistic but, dare I say it, slightly less interesting because overextended The Library at Night, allowed me to think about late style and the ways writers change as they go through life, and of course about libraries (I have a growing library about libraries, another favourite preoccupation); and Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records was like snap crackle and pop for my head, offering up an original, provocative model for narrative structure that I sometimes loved, sometimes wanted to argue with, sometimes felt estranged by, but always wanted to keep reading.

Today, I’m spending time with Julie Brominicks’ The Edge of Cymru. This book is several cuts above the average ‘I walked round X landscape for Y amount of time’ travelogue – a genre that flooded the bookshops in the wake of the success of Robert Macfarlane, and might have done more good for nature if many of its products had remained as unfelled trees. But Seren, who published this book and (full disclosure) have published two of my own, have unearthed a real gem here. I have been deeply moved by Brominicks’ writing – its specificity and humanity about love, belonging, language and home, and also her deep insight into the history of her subject. I’ve been able to situate my own family’s forced departure from Wales a century ago in a larger context thanks to her. It makes me all the more convinced that Welsh culture needs to make more room for the exiled Welsh diaspora in its discourse – the wave of emigration that followed the Great War, prompted by the collapse of the Welsh economy at that time, bears comparison with the equivalent Irish emigration, and that legacy is not one I read enough about.

Current Projects/Research

I don’t talk specifics about my work until it’s been announced for production or publication, but there are projects on the horizon in the public domain, so I will happily talk about them till the cows come home. Firstly there’s a new play called Going Out Out, premiering at HOME in Manchester this autumn. HOME invited me to write about drag in northern working men’s clubs in the 1970s back in 2021, and I accepted their invitation with delight and amazement. We were just beginning to emerge from an acutely identitarian moment in the theatre, a kind of right-wing Balkanism that swept the trade for a period, so for me – a southern, middle class, heterosexual, cis gender man born in the 1980s – to be invited to write a play set in this cultural context was surprising and inspiring. Of course, the only valid defence for the identitarianism of the late 2010s in the theatre was that people like me got far too much of the available work, and there was a need to rebalance a horribly uneven playing field, and I didn’t want to be working against the grain of that rebalancing, so I did question the invitation at first – but I was reassured that, having welcomed many artists from within the communities in question onto their stages to dramatise this and other similar cultural contexts, HOME now felt it would be interesting to bring in an outsider next and see the results of that cross-pollination. My work, therefore, would sit alongside a range of other stories written by a diverse group of artists. Which is what any good writer wants to hear, I think. The play I wrote, Going Out Out, is a story of a man recovering from grief who is lifted up and, in a way, forgiven by a community that welcomes and accepts him for who he is. 

Manchester is one of thirteen cities on three continents where my work is presently scheduled to appear in the next twelve months. Much of the travelling will be done by Sting’s The Last Ship, for which I’ve written a new book, as this extraordinary masterpiece finally reaches its climactic form. More than a decade after its premiere, The Last Ship has already been recognised as the greatest British musical written in my lifetime. But I actually think it’s the most significant musical work to emerge from these islands since Britten premiered Peter Grimes, and my work on the show has been dedicated to helping to establish that reputation for the work among the general public. It’s surreal and wonderful to have had the chance to work closely with Sting on a project he recognises as his greatest achievement. As a kid, I learned all the words to his songs, and listened to them more than almost any other music; I used to daydream about being a backing singer in The Police. In my own way, with my own skillset, I feel like I’ve found a way to achieve that dream. The show is opening in Amsterdam and Paris next January and February, with further dates and venues to be announced.

Finally, I have also begun a small project I’d love to direct readers towards. In February this year I moved to a cottage in Hampshire, a return to the rural environment where my life began, but which, of necessity, I had to leave behind for a time in order to fight my way into the theatre. As a method of reconnecting to the rural, I began making a list of every bird I saw each day in a little blue notebook I carried around with me. After three months, I knew the birds living in my garden so well that this act became unnecessary, and I began to expand my focus. It was writing as rooting, really, writing as settling in. The latest result of that has been a series of terza rima sonnets I’ve been writing about where I live, which I’ve been uploading to a Substack on Sundays. Last week I saw my friend the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, with whom I worked on adapting his novel The Remains of the Day for the stage back in 2019, and he asked me why I was doing this; I found I didn’t quite have a decent answer, and have been thinking about it since. I’ve come to realise they are a development of the birdwatching I’d done earlier this year, a process of homemaking; and, of course, a puzzle I’m happy getting lost in, preoccupied by what Yeats called ‘the fascination of what’s difficult’. If you have time, I’d love you to read them.

The Guardian recently published Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris’s tribute to the playwright and novelist Athol Fugard, who has died at the age of 92. You can read the full text below:

I feel that Athol Fugard and his wife, Paula Fourie, changed my life in the autumn of 2022 when I visited South Africa to spend time with them and their daughter Halle. We were supposed to be working on a book together, and we did; but our time became so much more than that. There were lunches in the house or the restaurant round the corner; walks in the woods; a braai that went on past midnight.

Over coffee in the mornings I’d sit with Athol and we’d use an app on his phone to identify the calls of all the birds in the garden. Then he might tell me a story from his life – the awe he felt when he asked Yvonne Bryceland to smash a chair to bits during rehearsals for Antigone and she proceeded to do so for a full 30 minutes; the journey he made by sea at 18 from Cairo to Japan, when an illiterate Somalian sailor used to watch him every night as he wrote a novel by hand, sitting on a deck hatch; and the way that sailor never spoke to him again when he finished the novel, decided it was terrible, and threw it in the sea.

Just once, he told me the story of a play he was planning. He spoke elegantly, carefully, slightly formally; I hardly dared breathe for fear he’d stop. He and I had shared certain extreme experiences, albeit more than half a century apart, which had been formative for both of us, and I think as a result we bonded quite strongly; over the course of my time with him we both cried together, taking one another’s hands. And all the time he treated me like I was enough. To receive that from someone whose life had been so vast radically altered my perspective.

His partner in creation and fun was Paula, perhaps the most formidably intelligent person I know. The project we were all working on together was, in part, an examination of Athol’s flaws. They were relentlessly clear-eyed and analytical in all they did. But they were also two extremely romantic people, to the point where they’d decided to start a family together. Athol remained a dreamer, full of plans to the end. His most striking quality, though, was his endless gratitude, which I think was nurtured by his many years as a practising Buddhist. He felt very lucky to have lived an extraordinary life.

I think that life contains an urgent lesson for us. His work is a model for how to resist a regime one detests while remaining committed to the country one loves – a pressing question for a great many people today. In his final public appearance, speaking to an online audience convened by the Society of Authors last year, he shared what I thought might be the key tenet of that project: “Anger is a withering emotion. It is better to write out of love.”

Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris’s new play, Second Best, inspired by the novel of the same name by David Foenkinos, opens on January 24th at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Starring Asa Butterfield (Sex Education), the play is directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Fly Davis, and runs till February 22nd. 

Book your tickets here.