Interview: Barney Norris brings Iberian passion to rural Wiltshire

Playwright Barney Norris on Blood Wedding

The month the Omnibus Theatre blazes with drama and dark comedy as Barney Norris’ Blood Wedding, a take on Lorca’s classic, hits the stage. In this interview, Barney gives the background on his decision to bring Iberian passion to the West Country.

What inspired you to transport the famous Spanish tragedy Blood Wedding to a Wiltshire village today?

Wiltshire is known as the Moonraker county. It got this nickname, so the story goes, because a group of smugglers were transporting a barrel of brandy over the Plain one night when they heard the excise man was coming down the road towards them. They chucked the barrel in a pond and sat by the road, nodding at the tax man as he passed. When he’d gone they started to try and fish the barrel out of the pond again. But the tax man had suspected the men by the roadside – Wiltshire was a dangerous place back then, a lot of the defeated Royalist cavaliers became highwaymen after the civil war ended and haunted the high country in the north of the county, and the area was reliably full of ruffians. So he doubled back to see what they were doing and saw them all up to their knees in the pond. He asked them what they thought they were doing, and one of the smugglers, in a flash of inspiration, pointed to the reflection of the moon in the water and said ‘we’re trying to get that there bit of cheeze.’ The tax man laughed at how thick the yokels were round here, and went on his way. 

That’s the most famous folk tale in Wiltshire, a story about people there being crooked; being crafty; being creative; and being dismissed as thick. I don’t love that, as a foundational myth for the place I come from! But Wiltshire is quite light on stories to tell about itself – if you go through the archives of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, you’ll find far fewer folk songs collected in Wiltshire than in all its neighbouring counties. So I thought it might be fun to try and build a new mythology for this place. And I’ve been doing that most of my adult life, and this is one iteration of that continuing project. Lorca writes beautifully, hauntingly about the moon in this play; I thought it might be a good lens through which to re-examine the myths of my home place.

You grew up in Wiltshire and that has informed several of your plays. How important is the setting in the play?

I think much of my work was motivated by a desire to articulate what it was like to be in places like this, and how much fun people had here, and how much pain people went through. I think Wiltshire in my work stands in for anywhere, really – a play could be set anywhere, and all the words would need to change but it could always have the same story, because plays work when they touch on what’s common in all of us. The urges that drive us. But I know Wiltshire pretty well, so that’s often felt like a good place to set things. 

How have you adapted the characters from Lorca’s original?

In the original, only one character, Leonardo, is named. Everyone else is named after the role they’re meant to play in the new family – ‘Bride’, ‘Bridegroom’, ‘Mother in Law’. Leonardo has no place in this structure – he’s the home wrecker – so he’s denied the role everyone else gets. He only has his name. I haven’t pursued that line of writing because I wanted to go further than simply translating the words of Lorca. I noticed that in his life, most of his box office receipts came from South America, and I thought it was interesting to think of him in a South American literary tradition – a proto-Borges, a proto-Marquez – rather than a European artist. So I wanted to translate the play into a post-Ibsenian psychological realist milieu, as well as into English.

Lorca acknowledged he’d lifted bits of Synge to create the play, so I almost saw it as ‘reverse translation’ back into Synge’s idiom. And Synge is all funny, truthful depictions of working people. So I aimed to draw on that. 

While Blood Wedding is a tragedy, your adaptation contains a lot of humour and comedy moments. How do you manage to balance the more comedic moments with the tragedy?

I think comedy makes us feel things more deeply. Comedy activates us. And comedy is the English ‘duende’. Lorca wrote extensively about this – the word loosely means ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and it’s what he’s writing about in Blood Wedding, the ‘duende’ that comes up from the soil of Spain through the soles of the feet into the hearts of people. We have duende, too. It’s not very like the Spanish duende, though. I think it’s made of laughter.

Aside from Lorca, are there other playwrights whose work has particularly inspired you? Do you have a favourite play?

I think immediately of my friends Peter Gill and Athol Fugard, whose plays mean everything to me; and of Robert Holman and David Storey, whose plays I have produced; and of Alan Bennett, who I feel increasingly drawn to as something close to the main event in English theatre. But above all I think of D.H.Lawrence. Lawrence, for me, is the foundational writer who stands behind these others. He is the beginning of a theatre that stages and centres ordinary life and insists on its beauty, the great breakthrough.

My own family come from slightly south of Lawrence’s, and were never miners, but essentially I recognise in Lawrence the breakthroughs that made my life possible – the impact of universal literacy unlocking minds that we’d never previously heard from. He never saw his work staged in his lifetime – but he wrote in his diaries, ‘if an audience can be found for Chekhov, surely an audience can be found for my stuff’. That’s the project I seek to be part of, the development of that audience. Of course there are others, speaking to other traditions I’m interested in – I go to Caryl Churchill, Thornton Wilder or W.B.Yeats to think about theatre poems, and Brian Friel and Synge and Tom Murphy and Conor Mcpherson to see how a truly great theatre culture works. But Lawrence is the great writer of the equal dignity of all people. He wrote in his first play, ‘as much happens for you as for other people’ – and that’s what I like theatre to tell everyone.

What made you first want to become a playwright, and what was your first big career break?

I fell into playwriting because I wasn’t good enough to be an actor, and I loved the theatre, madly, all-consumingly. I just wanted to be part of it, and I’d always liked writing, and I couldn’t get into drama school but I could get into writing courses, so I pursued that. And once I found something I seemed to be good at, I took Lawrence’s advice: ‘bite down and don’t let the bastards shake you off till the money starts flowing like blood’.

What do you feel has been your career highlight to date, and what are your future ambitions?

I have done several things I’m proud of in the theatre. My early plays, Visitors and Eventide, were very satisfying projects in 2014 and 2015; my play at the Bridge Theatre in 2018, Nightfall, was something I still can’t believe happened to me, the astonishing miracle of forming part of Nick Hytner and Nick Starr’s debut season in that beautiful space; my recent play Second Best at Riverside Studios felt like a play I could write better than anyone else, and that was a really good feeling. As was selling out a 400 seat room for 5 weeks, and feeling that audience rise to their feet every night! I’m still a bit in love with that experience. But what really stick in the mind are the collaborations, the people I’ve got to meet and work with. Theatre has allowed me to work with Ishiguro; Athol; Caryl; Peter; Linda Bassett; Claire Skinner; Niamh Cusack; Paule Constable; I shouldn’t list names because I’ll forget so many, but my life has put me in the path of so many people who are heroes to me, and that has made me very happy. Theatre’s a people art form, and the people are the best thing in it.

Why should people come to see Blood Wedding at The Omnibus?

I think it’s the funniest Lorca they’ll ever see, performed by fantastic actors with a beautiful design in one of the most beautiful corners of London. I’d suggest people come early, bring a picnic blanket, and make the Omnibus part of their theatregoing diet from here on, because any day that involves a glass of wine on Clapham Common has not been wasted.

Blood Wedding is playing at Omnibus Theatre until 24 May.