Casting and full creative team has been announced for The Watermill Theatre’s major new revival of Barney Norris’ award-winning play Visitors.
Opening at The Watermill Theatre Friday 31 March, the play will star Nathalie Barclay (Boeing Boeing UK Tour), Tessa Bell-Briggs (Steaming Harold Pinter Theatre), Christopher Ravenscroft (Witness for the Prosecution County Hall), best known for his role as Inspector Mike Burden in The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Patrick Toomey (Remains of the Day, Out of Joint) whose recent screen credits include Nolly (ITV) and The Crown (Netflix).
The play will also be directed by Barney Norris (The Wellspring – Royal and Derngate, Nightfall – The Bridge Theatre), 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.
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.
Revisiting stories as we go through our lives is a pleasure nearly all of us know – we all see multiple productions of the same Shakespeare, re-read our favourite novels, re-watch our favourite films. Returning to a play I wrote as a younger man has been a fascinating way of marking the passing of my own time. When I first staged this play, nothing had ever really gone wrong in my life. Now, a decade older, having survived some difficult times, and been a carer myself – care and caring are central to the vision of love offered in VISITORS – I look back at this play and I can see how I have changed. That’s exciting and intriguing – it will lead to a different production, and I can’t wait to see how it develops.”
The creative team includes design from Good Teeth (a theatre design studio founded by James Perkins and Victoria Smart, Associate Artists at the Lyric Hammersmith), with lighting design by James Whiteside and with sound design and composition from Anna Clock. The stage management team are Caitlin Ravenscroft (DSM), Gracie Adlington (ASM) and Natalie Toney (ASM).
Visitors will run from 31 March 2023 until Saturday 22 April 2023 at The Watermill Theatre, Wiltshire.
