Barney Norris
Contemporary British theatre has continued to develop a strong tradition of literary playwriting, with dramatists working across both stage and page to explore the possibilities of dramatic form. Barney Norris, born in Chichester in 1987, is a United Kingdom citizen who works within this tradition as a writer, playwright, and dramaturge.
Norris was educated at Bishop Wordsworth's Church of England Grammar School before going on to study at Keble College and later at Royal Holloway, University of London. This combination of educational settings, spanning secondary schooling in the cathedral city of his birth through to postgraduate study, provided the foundation for his work across multiple forms of writing. As both a playwright and a dramaturge, Norris occupies a dual role in the theatre: the playwright shapes text for performance, while the dramaturg engages critically with the development and structure of dramatic work. His practice as a writer extends beyond the stage as well, reflecting the broader tendency among British theatre practitioners to move between dramatic and prose forms.
Working in British English, Norris brings to his writing the particular register and concerns of contemporary literary culture in the United Kingdom. His output as a playwright and writer places him among those practitioners for whom the written word and the performed text remain closely intertwined, with each mode of writing informing the other. The dual designation of writer and dramaturge suggests an engagement not only with the production of new work but also with the critical and structural questions that surround the making of theatre.
Norris has been recognised with election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, one of the United Kingdom's most established honours for writers. This recognition places him formally within a community of writers acknowledged for their contribution to literature in the English language.
Quotes by Barney Norris
Barney Norris's insights on:
That’s how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.
That was the hardest thing, that in the end nothing was healed by medicine or medical expertise – people recovered because they willed those recoveries into being; they fought until they could live in the world again.
Now I am old I wish the young man I used to be had worried less about the past and lived more heedlessly in the present. I suppose I did as much living as I could. But I burn to tell men and women who are still young now how quickly it is going to get behind them, how fiercely they ought to love it while they can.
What do people do with their lives? I mean seriously, literally, hour for hour, what does everyone do? When I was at school I felt perfectly ordinary, just like anyone else, but now it is as if I have forgotten how. I have to do impersonations of a real human being to fit in anywhere or even get served in the supermarket. I have lost my instinct and taste for life, and my days feel like eating with a cold now, knowing you need soup, swallowing, not being able to taste it.
The mind is like a floodplain. The slightest rainfall can leave it awash with old stories that seep into your newer terrors and swell them, drown you under long-forgotten feelings as your life rushes over you.
There are days my life snags on and I keep circling back to them. These are the roots of all I do, and if an observer were to lay those days lodged in my memory over the surface of my present, perhaps all my life would be explained, all problems solved, all wounds revealed.
Every bar in the scores of ourselves is already into memory into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.
The world holds no trace of what happens in it unless we carve it in with violence or concrete.
The thing about stone is you don't get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable.