Visitors

by Barney Norris

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 care for Edie as her mind unravels, the family are forced to are we living the way we wanted?

Visitors is a haunting, beautiful look at the way our lives slip past us.

Critics Circle Award 2014 for Most Promising Playwright.

Winner of the Best New Play Award at the Off West End Theatre Awards 2014.

Shortlisted for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright and the Writers Guild of Great Britain 2014 award for Best Play.

Genres: Plays

88 pages, Paperback

First published July 7, 2014

About the author

Barney Norris is a playwright and novelist. His work has received awards from the International Theatre Institute, the Critics' Circle, the Evening Standard, the Society of Authors and the South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Awards, among others, and been translated into eight languages. His plays include Visitors, Nightfall and an acclaimed adaptation of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day; his novels include Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quiet, unassuming little character study about an elderly couple coming to grips with aging and incipient dementia is rather Chekhovian in how not much actually happens, but all the world is explored. I'm sure with excellent actors it comes alive on stage, but it is rather dull just reading it.

[Michael Reffold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very believable and wistful.

[cosmina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Barney Norris a lot. He truly understands people and I believe that's a gift.

[Cara Patel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this with a few friends, and it was ultimately very forgetable, I don't see this being a play I re-visit. Mainly because this play feels like a premise with no plot.

I thought the writing was good (I laughed out loud several times at witty remarks), I thought some of the characters were well fleshed out and two dimentional (namely Edie and Arthur), there were no gaping plot holes, and it felt pretty human.

The main issue I had was that it never went far enough with any of the aspects that could have become plot. The son was never made bad enough to have an interesting character arc, the girl they hired added nothing to the story and her sub plot went no-where, we had assumed that the old couple were going to set traps to scare off any visitors trying to buy the house (but that turned out to be nothing but a throwaway line), and we thought that the son had hired kate specifically to kill of his parents (but that never materialised).

Ultimately it was just pretty dull.

[Dorottya · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

This is a really sweet story about an elderly husband and wife, their memories, and him having to make decisions as her condition is getting worse. It also deals with loads of social and moral issues.