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.
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