Barney Norris is a young dramatist whose previous plays, Visitors and Eventide, have shown a rare capacity to distil the quiet poetry of everyday lives. Now Norris extends his range with a more ambitious work dealing with the impact of the first world war on rural Wiltshire. While it doesn’t sufficiently exploit the advantages of a larger stage, it has an emotional pull and sense of place that confirm Norris as a writer to watch. The story is, outwardly, very simple. John and Anna are young people who have grown up as close neighbours in a farming community: his mum and her dad both expect the pair will one day marry. Not only, however, is their relationship much edgier than the grownups realise. This is 1915 and private lives are shaped by public events. John enlists, partly out of resentment at Anna’s refusal to consummate their lifelong friendship, and in his absence she finds solace in the arms of a wounded New Zealand soldier based in one of the camps on Salisbury Plain. The consequences are foreseeable but still shattering for all concerned.
Familiar as we are with plays and novels about lives devastated by war, Norris’s story moves one by its geographical specificity. John’s mum unexpectedly rages against the pious patriotism that has supposedly driven her son to enlist, arguing that his real country is the Wiltshire soil in which he has grown up. We also see how those who work the land, living hand to mouth, loathe the army for its abundant rations and are forced to buy the surplus military provisions at an exorbitant price. Norris punctures the myth of a civilian population cheering on the heroic soldiery, and he shows the long reach of history, as an old poacher recalls a grandfather who fought at Waterloo.
Norris captures precisely the contradictions created by war: Anna, in particular, is torn between pride and fury at John’s abrupt enlistment. But, while Norris writes about people and place with the nuanced understanding of a rural David Storey, he doesn’t yet create resonant visual metaphors. Alice Hamilton’s production looks beautiful, thanks to Tom Rogers’s set, with its grassy hillside and panoramic Wiltshire sky. But, aside from a scene where John and Anna don cumbersome potato sprayers, you don’t get a sense of the hard labour that defines these people’s lives.
The acting, however, is very good. Katie Moore as Anna and Tom Byrne as John suggest a young couple who are privy to each other’s thoughts and feelings but who are for ever separated by an imbalance of passion. David Beames and Sadie Shimmin as their respective parents plausibly show how an older generation look to the young to make up for their own disappointments. Oliver Hembrough as the intrusive Kiwi and Robin Soans as the ex-poacher who has acquired the self-conscious quirkiness of a rural “character” add texture to a work that will, I suspect, lodge in the memory when flashier plays have faded into oblivion.
- At Salisbury Playhouse until 15 April. Box office: 01722 320 333.
