PUNK NETWORKING by Barney Norris

I was delighted to learn last week that a young artist named Clare Baybutt had been awarded funding by the Arts Council to co-produce her first play with Oxford Playhouse and Reading Rep.

I was first introduced to Clare by a mutual friend two years ago. Guy Rolfe, the aforementioned mutual friend, runs a day centre for disabled children in Hampshire, and in 2013 he allowed my company, Up In Arms, to present my play FEAR OF MUSIC there. The play was set nearby, and Guy made it possible for us to share our work with the people it was about.

Guy and I first met because I used to serve him in the pub where I worked in the village of Tangley. So I was intrigued when he got in touch to say a young woman who worked in the pub in the next village was also writing a play, and wanted to talk to me.

Clare was finishing a degree at the Royal College of Art, and invited me to a rehearsal of the verbatim play she was growing about the impact of trauma on military families. I loved her work when I saw it, and booked the show into Oxford Playhouse’s studio for a night. Oxford and Reading had just co-produced a revival of my play EVERY YOU EVERY ME, touring a show about young people’s mental health round schools in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and were looking for another project to work on together. They liked what Clare was doing as well, and now a show is going to happen, a story will be told that I think people need to hear.

I wanted to share this news because so much of it inspires me. It’s thrilling to me that a production line of socially conscious work by emerging artists is springing up in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It’s thrilling to see that a theatre the size of Oxford, in particular, will back a project like this, and that the Arts Council will back talent when it emerges in this way. For people out there working for their break, I hope that’s reassuring. Opportunities await you – the industry will listen when you’re ready to tell that story people need to hear.

Above all, though, it inspires me that this production started with bar staff from two Hampshire pubs being introduced by someone who bought pints off both of them. This is the old punk truth of theatre, of all art: it might look like a scene you have to work your way into, but in fact you can speak up from wherever you’re standing, and any human relationship you forge, not just the ones you make with the influencers, can become the route you take into the life you want. I learned that very early – I run my company with someone I met in youth theatre, when we were both just kids. Clare’s story reminds me of the thrill of that secret – the exhilarating truth that you can turn any place and any partnership into the centre of the world, if you’ve got an idea that people will believe in.    Barney Norris    July 2017

Barney Norris is an award-winning playwright, poet, essayist and novelist. He is founder of the Up In Arms theatre company. His first full-length play, Visitors, won the Critics’ Circle and Off West End Awards for Most Promising Playwright. He has published poetry in several magazines and a biography of director Peter Gill. His first novel Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain was published to critical acclaim in 2016.