Rushen Players

Visitors

by Barney Norris

MAY 2026
Thursday 14th to Saturday 16th : Curtain 7:30pm
Erin Arts Centre, Port Erin
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These notes are to provide a little more background information to the play
than we are able to fit in the paper programme

Director’s Notes

Welcome to the Rushen Players’ production of Visitors

The Playwright:

Barney Norris was born in Sussex in 1987. He studied English at Oxford
before founding a touring theatre company Up in Arms and then becoming a full-time writer.
He also lectures in creative writing and regularly reviews fiction for The Guardian.
For Visitors, his first full-length play, he won the Critics’ Circle Award and
Off West End Award for Most Promising Playwright.

He was also nominated for the Writers'Guild of Great Britain, Best New Play Award
and the Evening Standard, Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright.

The Play:

Visitors premiered at the Arcola Theatre in London in March 2014.
The cast included Linda Bassett, Eleanor Wyld, Simon Muller, and
Robin Soans who was nominated for Best Actor at the Off West End Awards.
Alice Hamilton was nominated as Best Director for the production.
The play received widespread acclaim from theatre critics for its sensitive
and perceptive handling of the real-life domestic issues surrounding dementia,
aging and married love that are rarely seen on stage.

Reviews:

‘Sometimes the best plays are the quietest. [The play] deftly draws in a sense of lives lived
and navigates its way through vast themes with warmth, compassion and wit.’ Financial Times

‘There is great richness and an almost poetic resonance in the writing so that we can almost see the
play of light across the fields and apprehend the jolting dislocation of dementia.’ The Telegraph

‘What is refreshing about the play is that it avoids that easy pity that is close cousin to contempt.
You feel Norris even envies his old couple who, whatever their present difficulties,
are bound together in a molten marriage and who have made the best of
their lives… there is something infinitely touching about their sense of a shared past.’ The Guardian

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