Visitors in rehearsals. Photo by Chloe Wicks
In 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 ask: are we living the way we wanted?
“An absolute beauty, by turns funny, tender and desperately sad.” The Telegraph
A beautiful and sharply funny love story, Visitors takes a haunting look at the way our lives slip past us. Direct from a national tour and a sell-out run at the Arcola Theatre, the cast includes two Bush Theatre alumni: the award-winning Linda Bassett (East is East, Calendar Girls, Grandma’s House) and celebrated actor Robin Soans (Hamlet, As You Like It, RSC; The Contingency Plan, Bush Theatre; The Queen, Granada Film).
Nominated for the Evening Standard’s Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright.
Presented by Up in Arms in association with the Bush Theatre.
Alice Hamilton is co-artistic director of Up in Arms. Work for the company includes German Skerries (Orange Tree), Eventide (Arcola and tour), Visitors (Bush, Arcola and tour), Fear of Music (tour with Out of Joint), Missing (Tristan Bates) and At First Sight(Latitude Festival and tour). Other directing work includes Orca (Papatango/Southwark Playhouse) and Orson’s Shadow (Jagged Fence/Southwark Playhouse). She worked as Staff Director on Man and Superman at the National Theatre, and has directed development workshops and rehearsed readings with the Royal Court, National Theatre, Salisbury Playhouse, and High Tide.
Barney Norris was born in Sussex in 1987. Upon leaving university he founded the touring theatre company Up In Arms with the director Alice Hamilton. His plays include Visitors (Up In Arms, Arcola, Bush and tour) and Eventide (Up In Arms, Arcola and tour). His first novel, Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain, is published by Doubleday, and he is also the author of a book on theatre, To Bodies Gone: The Theatre of Peter Gill, published by Seren. He won the Critics’ Circle and Offwestend Awards for Most Promising Playwright in 2014, was named as one of the 1000 Most Influential Londoners in 2015, and was the Literature nominee for the South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award in 2016. He is the Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford. Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain is currently Waterstone’s Book of the Month.
Chloe is also Project Co-Ordinator at Complicite and Producer at Mouths of Lions. She has previously produced work for Oxford Playhouse, BAC, Wilderness Festival, Secret Garden Party, Shunt Vaults and Liverpool’s City of Culture Festival.
George Dennis’s theatre sound design credits include: The Homecoming (The Jamie Lloyd Company/Trafalgar Studios, Olivier Award nomination); The Pitchfork Disney, Killer (Shoreditch Town Hall); The Convert, In the Night Time, Image of an Unknown Young Woman, Eclipsed, The Edge of our Bodies (Gate Theatre); Babe, the Sheep-Pig (Polka Theatre/UK Tour); Harrogate (also HighTide Festival), Fireworks, Liberian Girl, Primetime (Royal Court); The Mountaintop, The Island (Young Vic); Imogen, The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare’s Globe); In Fidelity (Traverse/HighTide Festival); Noises Off (Nottingham Playhouse/Northern Stage/Nuffield Southampton); German Skerries (Orange Tree); Brave New World, Regeneration (Royal and Derngate/Touring Consortium); Forget Me Not, Visitors (Bush Theatre); Eventide (Arcola Theatre/UK Tour); Chicken (Eastern Angles/Unity Theatre); Beautiful Thing (Arts Theatre/UK Tour); A Breakfast of Eels, The Last Yankee (Print Room); peddling (Arcola Theatre/59E59, New York/HighTide Festival); Mametz (National Theatre of Wales); Minotaur (Polka Theatre/Clwyd Theatr Cymru); Spring Awakening (Headlong); Love Your Soldiers (Sheffield Crucible Studio); Thark (Park Theatre); Moth (Bush Theatre/HighTide Festival); Hello/Goodbye (Hampstead Theatre); Liar Liar (Unicorn Theatre); Good Grief (Theatre Royal Bath/UK Tour); The Seven Year Itch (Salisbury Playhouse); When Did You Last See My Mother? (Trafalgar Studios 2); Debris, The Seagull, The Only True History of Lizzie Finn (Southwark Playhouse); A Life, Foxfinder (Finborough Theatre).
Simon trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama for a Master of Arts in Theatre Design (Lighting). Theatre and Opera credits include German Skerries (Orange Tree Theatre), Eventide (Arcola Theatre), Visitors (Bush Theatre), Stone Face, A Subject of Scandal and Concern (Finborough Theatre), Eye of a Needle (Southwark Playhouse), Rhythm of Silence (The Egg, Bath Theatre Royal), Macbeths (Hope Theatre), Sweeney Todd (Twickenham Theatre), Pincher Martin (Britten Theatre, RCM), Othello: Deconstructed (The North Wall, Oxford), Woman in the Dunes, Girl From Nowhere (Theatre 503), I Cinna [The Poet] (St James Theatre Studio), Fear of Music (UK Tour), The Arensky Chamber Orchestra (QEH, Southbank Centre) and Twelfth Night (Cambridge Arts Theatre).
