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- I think the local community's supportive. - Yeah, of like, good stuff. Bric-a-brac sales and choral singing and local elections and swingers'parties, not you and me messing about with a drum kit. Joe, Ross and Ellie used to be in a band. They were pretty good too, making waves across a rugged patchwork of pubs and clubs. They even had a song on Radio 2. But that was all a long time ago and the songs, the stories, the secrets are long since buried. Time has thrown the three friends far from their younger selves. Back together for one night only to play a benefit gig in their home town, they find a community reeling from a poisoning and a pandemic. And as they rehearse the old songs, the stories and secrets must also be excavated. The Band Back Together premiered in a touring production by Farnham Maltings in March 2024.

Home is a moment that's quickly lost. Afterwards you can only sail through the ghost of it. The Wellspring explores the complex and shifting dynamic between a father and son, as the writer Barney Norris and the musician David Owen Norris overlay the palimpsests of their separate lives in a cycle of memories that gradually intertwine and become a concerted search for connection, belonging and home. The Wellspring opens at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton, in March 2022.

I wish there could be a day where families came together and just said it all to each other. Because then everyone would know it all, and there'd be nothing left to hurt anyone. Sussex. London. Wiltshire. Northamptonshire. Wales. Over three decades, a family spreads across the country, and the chord they made together starts to fray, the distance between them changing the music of their lives. Barney Norris's We Started to Sing is a love song to the people who raised him, and a hymn to the bravery of our brief lives. The play premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in May 2022.

A Wiltshire village, 2019. Rob and his fiancée Georgie are checking out the village hall for their wedding reception. Rob's mum wonders if they are rushing into things. Just when they begin to talk her round, an old flame who could shatter the wedding plans turns up, and very soon Georgie's past is making her question who really is the love of her life... Barney Norris's explosive retelling of Lorca's classic tragedy sets the action firmly in a modern day village community that's rocked by revelations and gossip.

'A rare duet, in which father and son rediscover a whole world through the redeeming power of art.'– Declan Kiberd In The Wellspring acclaimed novelist and dramatist Barney Norris conducts a conversation with father, the pianist and composer David Owen Norris –'quite possibly the most interesting pianist in the world'(Toronto Globe and Mail) and'a famous thinker/philosopher of the keyboard'(Seattle Times). Norris senior is also a television and radio broadcaster who has worked with a huge range of musicians, conductors and composers in the concert hall and the studio. Divided into three parts –'Listening','Playing'and'Writing'–The Wellspring is the first book to explore Norris's fifty-year career and discover how his background (non-metropolitan, C of E, literary) influenced his choices and his music. The book becomes a study of the relationship between his Englishness and his work, of his inheritance and how it is projected forward into new compositions and new performance. In the process the reader encounters a fascinating world of concerts, prizes, collaborations, and inspirations, in which Norris, always open to the different, has lived. This variety includes Norris's devotion to Parry and Elgar, his musical discoveries made playing the square piano of the nineteenth century, and the opportunities resulting from the pressurized world of competitions. In addition to exploring the career of this renowned musician, the father-son conversation also reveals Barney Norris's experience of working in English theatre over the last ten years and of his practice as a novelist with a growing reputation. Their combined experience, in two fields, in two different generations, provides a thought-provoking discussion of how a place and a culture inform artistic work, and how England and Englishness have evolved during the past half century. Informative, entertaining, at times provocative, The Wellspring will become a classic investigation of creativity, of Englishness, and of the changing world.

Visitors: On a farmhouse at the edge of Salisbury Plain, a family is falling apart. Stephen can't afford to put his mother into care; Arthur can't afford to stop working and look after his wife. When a young stranger with blue hair moves in to look after Edie as her mind unravels, the family are forced to ask: are we living the way we wanted? Visitors is a haunting, beautiful look at the way our lives slip past us. Eventide: A love song, an elegy, a celebration: Eventide tells the story of three people whose worlds are disappearing. John is a landlord forced to sell up; Liz is a church organist who can't get a gig; Mark takes what work he can just to pay the rent. Their tale unfold round the back of a pub hidden deep in the heart of the Hampshire countryside – a heart that doesn't seem to be beating any more. While We're Here: Eddie and Carol were lovers once, but their lives went in different directions. Now they meet again on a park bench in a town full of memories, and find something still burns between them. Nightfall: What you believed in seemed to vanish overnight. So how are you going to live now? One family struggling in the heart of the country looks for a star to steer by as they try to plot a route out of the dark they've been pitched into.

“Sometimes I think my whole life has been a frightening time. I remember the crunch of the gravel under my feet walking back up the drive, and thinking my life might be over. I might have had all of my fun.” Eddie and Carol were lovers once, but their lives went in different directions. Now they meet again in a town full of memories, and find something still burns between them. On the country's southern margin where the towns give way to the English Channel, both search for the centre of their lives. Will they find a way to let go of the past for the sake of their futures? A moving new play from acclaimed touring theatre company Up In Arms in co production with the Bush Theatre and Farnham Maltings.

Wiltshire. 1915. As the shadow of war falls over the landscape, a young couple find themselves caught up in the turmoil of troubled times. For generations, John and Anna's families have made a living working the land. Growing up next door to each other in back-to-back cottages, everyone has always expected them to marry. Now, with half a million young soldiers pouring into the county, the world seems bigger than they ever imagined, and the future far from certain. Echo's End is a story about two Wiltshire families and the seismic changes which altered their lives and the identity of their county forever. Echo's End was commissioned by Salisbury Playhouse, and received its world premiere production there in 2017.

‘Try and do something with your life. Be deliberate, you know?'A love song, an elegy, a celebration – Eventide tells the story of three people whose worlds are disappearing. John is a landlord forced to sell up; Liz is a church organist who can't get a gig; Mark takes what work he can just to pay the rent. Their tales unfold round the back of a pub hidden deep in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. But is that heart still beating?

This is the first study of one of the most significant voices of modern international theatre, one of Wales's leading writers, and one of the most compelling and beautiful bodies of work in the last fifty years. To Bodies Gone is written by playwright Barney Norris, who has assisted in Gill's productions and possesses an intimate and personal knowledge of Gill's processes and values. He explores a career remarkable in its constancy from the groundbreaking stagingideas of the early productions to the extraordinary heights of the mature work, illustrated by the rave reviews for Versailles, Gill latest play. Norris's principle theme is the aesthetic Gill introduced to theatre, and which has remained the bedrock of his work, in its various manifestations across several decades: Gill's work as a writer and director has consistently revealed the extraordinary in the daily world. Analysing his career broadly chronologically, this study places Gill's work in the wider context of the theatre, providing a portrait ofBritish theatre in the second half of the twentieth century and contributing new insights into theatre history. To Bodies Gone includes chapters on Gill's early work, influences (Lawrence, Chekhov, Beckett), his translations and adaptations (Lawrence, Chekhov, Wedekind, Faulkner), his directing career at the Royal Court, Riverside Studios, National Theatre and NT Studio, plus his major plays - Small Change, Kick for Touch, In the Blue, Cardiff East, The York Realist and, most recently, Versailles, Gill's exploration of the new order following the first world war. The result is a major study full of insight into Gill and into British Theatre.