After studying at Keble from 2006-09, Barney Norris returns to the Burton Taylor and Oxford in 9th week with his touring play Fear of Music. Now working for a professional company, Norris’s interest in drama was ignited by the Keble O’Reilly, which he believes is a great opportunity for Oxford students. “It allows you to programme a space 20 years before you’d usually get the opportunity to do so, as well as being a place where you can take full creative control.”
Despite being threatened with removal from the university for poor academic performance, Norris was already writing plays during his degree, including Fear of Music. It was during his tenure as Drama Officer in 2010 that the first reading of this play was performed at the Playhouse, but Norris himself admits, “It was not very good; more of an interesting relationship between two boys than a story. But I continued to improve it.”
Fear of Music has been a long-term project for Norris, his initial exploration into the relationship between two boys later developing into a plot about two brothers, one of whom is leaving in the near future to go to university and trying to prevent his younger brother from joining the army like their absent father. Norris included the army in Fear of Music after seeing an MoD advertising campaign with the slogan, “I want to do more with my life than flip burgers.” He says, “It seemed pretty rough to me because the army marketing department targets areas of least social engagement, where people are unlikely to find great jobs. It belittles people into joining the armed forces.”
The play is set in 1988 Andover, chosen because of its many parallels with today. “Just like then, education’s getting more expensive, jobs are getting harder to get hold of, benefits are being cut, and social isolation for those not born into happy, middle-class families is a big problem. Most theatre now is boringly irrelevant as it is about people who own their own flats at 25. We’re in a middle ground which nearly everybody inhabits but isn’t talked about – where people are fine but when political waves wash over them their lives change.”
The most important topic the play deals with is social isolation. “We make ourselves lonely through a need for security – isolation is safe. There’s nothing to disrupt you on an island. The need to connect with another person requires, at some point, overcoming shyness. In Fear of Music, they can’t speak about their dad, they can’t speak about their mum, and they can’t even talk to each other.
And then one of them has got to leave as he’s got a place at university, and that is what the play is. Most of us live our lives feeling shy and insecure. These brothers are people who want to engage with life and music, but can’t quite.”
Norris goes on, “I hope people can connect with it in the same way I do with good theatre. It is a room which I am able to go into, and if it is a good play I feel the need to call someone. When I enter, I am quiet for an hour and consequently I can engage with my own life through the medium of someone else’s. That is it.”
