Bridge Theatre | Nightfall programme

BY BARNEY NORRIS

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSEN

SHOWING SOON AT THE BRIDGE THEATRE

LAURA LINNEY

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON

BY ELIZABETH STROUT ADAPTED BY RONA MUNRO 2 – 23 JUNE

ALLELUJAH! A NEW PLAY BY ALAN BENNETT 11 JULY – 28 SEPTEMBER JIM BROADBENT

A VERY VERY VERY DARK MATTER A NEW PLAY BY MARTIN MCDONAGH 10 OCTOBER 2018 – 6 JANUARY 2019

ALYS, ALWAYS

BY LUCINDA COXON BASED ON THE NOVEL BY HARRIET LANE FROM 23 JANUARY 2019

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NIGHTFALL A new play by Barney Norris CAST IN ORDER OF SPEAKING LOU

Ophelia Lovibond

RYAN

Sion Daniel Young

PETE

Ukweli Roach

JENNY

Claire Skinner

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Laurie Sansom

DESIGNER

Rae Smith

LIGHTING DESIGNER

Chris Davey

SOUND DESIGNER

Christopher Shutt

MUSIC

Gareth Williams

VIDEO DESIGNER

Ian William Galloway

CASTING DIRECTOR

Toby Whale

COSTUME SUPERVISOR

Lydia Crimp

PROPS SUPERVISOR

Lily Mollgaard

OPENING

Bridge Theatre, 8 May 2018.

LENGTH

About 2 hours 20 minutes, including a 20-minute interval. Please see Front of House staff for accurate timings.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea DYLAN THOMAS, FROM ‘FERN HILL’

FOR BRIDGE THEATRE Co-Founder Nicholas Hytner

Co-Founder Nick Starr

Technical Producer Katrina Gilroy

Director of Creative Development David Sabel

General Manager Andrew Leveson

Head of Sales and Audience Insight Pauline Fallowell

Head of Technical Operations Jonny Pascoe

Deputy Head of Stage Ollie Pickering

Head of Lighting Nicole Smith

Deputy Head of Lighting James Lye

Head of Sound Andrew Josephs

Head of Costume Eleanor Dolan

Stage Supervisor James Edwards

Technical Swing Bethany Laing

House Manager Charlie Smith

Deputy House Manager Terri Hammond

Interim House Manager Maureen Huish

Front of House Operations Manager Louis Szecowka

Bar Manager Mya Brown

Finance Manager Jenni Farge

Design Associate Nick Murray

Production Assistants Bellaray Bertrand- Webb Millie Brierley Rozzy Knox

Box Office Supervisor Rhea Heath

FoH Supervisors Igor Memić Brett Somerville

FoH Cover Supervisors Ruesharn Bryan Campbell Ferguson Chris Kasapi Rebecca Lamb Shyan MacTavish

Payroll Assistant Leanne Mills

Stage Door Manager Rosie Howell

Literary Consultant Will Mortimer

Programme Editor Lyn Haill

Programme Designer Clare Nicholson, Wheatsheafstudios

Programmes printed by Cantate Communications

Business Affairs Advisor Neil Adleman

Monday Nights Consultant Fran Miller

PR Janine Shalom, Premier, 0207 292 8330

Marketing Agency Joe Public

Branding Agency Koto

Website Development Substrakt

Ticketing and Marketing Software Spektrix

Media Agency AKA

Facilities Manager Oli Back

FOR NIGHTFALL Production Manager Lloyd Thomas

Company Stage Manager Jason Benterman

Deputy Stage Manager Caroline Meer

Assistant Stage Manager Rowan Stolton

Lighting Programmer Elliot Smith

Lighting Operator Tamykha Patterson

Lighting Crew David Butler Rhys Mills Marianne Nightingale Chris Withers

Sound Operator Laura Gingell

Production Sound Engineers Matt Ferrie Ryan Griffin

Special Effects Paul Wanklin

Video Engineer and Programmer Leo Flint

Video Animator Peta-Gaye Josephs

P roduction Electrician Anthony Arblaster

Production Carpenters Nat Lunn Dan Weager

Stage Crew Fraser Robinson

Wardrobe Manager Anna Bliss Scully

Deputy Wardrobe Manager Sarah Burton

Production Photographer Manuel Harlan

Poster Photographer Chris Mosey

Set built and painted by All Scene All Props

Landscaping and dressing Danielle Barr Vicki Fifield Morwenna Holttum

Greenery supplied by Living Props Thames Turf

Lighting supplied by Sparks Theatrical Hire

Sound supplied by Autograph Sound Recording

Video supplied by Blue-i Theatre Technology

Rigging provided by Rigging Services

Transport provided by Paul Mathew Transport

Crew provided by Pirate Crew Gallow Glass

Special thanks to Alexandra Harris Jack Lamont Sparsholt College Hampshire

BARNEY NORRIS AND HIS

COUNTRY Alexandra Harris

T

he subject matter of Nightfall is in some ways very familiar.

A farm is failing, and the young owner who has inherited it from his father is both proud and trapped, desperate to save the thing that has been passed down and aware that he is struggling against the tide to no very obvious purpose. The story has been told over and over since industrialisation first pulled sons and daughters away from the land their families had known and cultivated.

There is a pattern, but each time it is a different piece of land, a different future beckoning, and an utterly distinct history of habitation.

Barney Norris is less emphatic than many writers on rural subjects about the land itself and natural processes. We do not see his people as small figures toiling at the mercy of earth and sky. They are right up close, and it’s what they do to and for each other that counts.

‘The view’ is invoked in Nightfall as a pull to the land, but it’s promptly dismissed: there is no conventionally beautiful scenery on offer.

But there is something more elusive, an ‘atmosphere’, which is

Note: Images have been removed from this digital edition for rights reasons.

as strong and complex here as the ‘genius loci’, or spirit of place, courted by grand landscape gardeners since the eighteenth century. What we see of a place from the outside is often the look of it, and though we may seek to communicate our appreciation by describing (or photographing, or painting) a view, places often exert a powerful force that has nothing to do with the picturesque.

Contemporary artists in many media have shown that force at work.

We might think of George Shaw painting the garages of the Tile Hill housing estate where he grew up, recording with love – because his ‘whole life happened’ here for many years – the rusty metal and the cracked tarmac drive. Familiarity turns the garages into a subject for luxuriant pastoral. In her desolating 2017 film The Levelling, about a young woman returning to a ruined family farm in the flooded Somerset Levels, Hope Dixon Leach allows us to

ALE X ANDR A HARRIS

glimpse the forbidding beauty of a landscape in which sodden fields answer leaden sky, while keeping always in the foreground the exhausting, sinking, mud-clotted struggle that characterises life here from dawn to dusk. She knows, as Norris knows, what it might be to rage against the place that draws and holds you.

In a series of frankly compassionate plays and two brave, expansive novels, Barney Norris has asked ‘who’s here?’ and ‘what do they feel about it?’ An ageing husband and wife in Visitors (2014) approach the end of 40 years spent together in a farmhouse on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Their lives have been rooted in this place and in their commitment to each other. They are still in love, though dementia makes it hard to find the words and the farm they made will soon be

sold. Norris raised the funds for Visitors while working in a pub, and the community of that pub became the inspiration for Eventide (2015).

This play, too, is about a kind of fierce, loving, local coherence that is disappearing as the landlord sells up and the customers struggle to find work. Though he explores the constraints that accompany rootedness, Norris is forthright in honouring the kinds of hospitality, care, and common responsibility that accrue through time.

Particularity about local life is a guiding principle of Up in Arms, the theatre company Norris co-founded with director Alice Hamilton and stage manager Charlie Young. The name suggests a characteristic mix of fighting spirit and large embrace; if Norris ever sang “of arms and the man” like Virgil in The Aeneid, he would mean arms hugging or holding or waving a loved one off. Up in Arms seeks to make plays “about people and the places they’re from”. It’s a central tenet of the company that the work should tour, growing up from and reaching back into the communities of county towns and cathedral cities, places that often fall between cracks in our imaginative (and

financial) commitment to ‘deep country’ on the one hand and on the other to fast-growing, highly-connected urban centres.

Norris now lives in London and is attentive to forms of city movement and belonging, but he keeps returning to his own local feelings for the parts of Hampshire he knows best. ‘Just north of Andover’ doesn’t sound romantic, but that’s part of the point. Mention that it’s between Winchester and Salisbury and the tone changes, we’re suddenly in the heartlands of ancient Wessex. We’re on the sacred ground of Stonehenge. Is it ordinary or mythic here? Like all places that have inspired strong feelings, it is necessarily both. Norris chose a resoundingly biblical title for his 2016 novel about lives in contemporary Salisbury, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain. It’s topographically accurate (five rivers converge with the Avon) and it invokes the four rivers said to flow through Eden. The sequel to Genesis, Norris implies, one of the many million aftermaths of paradise and fall, is life in an English county town, where love and death strike with their usual ferocity, and a boy is ecstatic on the way to choir, and a sad, tender, foul-mouthed woman perceives, just out of reach, the existence she would like to lead. Norris looks out through the eyes of a flower seller, a teenage boy, a lonely army wife, a widower and a security guard who spends the nights up on Old Sarum with the car radio to keep him company and the distant cathedral spire as affirmation that people have found meaning here. Five lives meet like rivers, “giving voice to the song being sung by the world”.

Local writing has been one of the strongest traditions in British and Irish literature at least since Wordsworth relocated Eden to the mountain paths and sheepfolds of his native Cumbria in the 1790s. In her feelingly argued study Local Attachments, Fiona Stafford observes the radical and egalitarian impulse with which Romantic poets turned to regional subjects. “Poetry that originated in an identifiable region seemed to speak for individual distinction”, she suggests, “and to assert the importance of every member of society.”

The truth of that is still clear in 2018 and in Norris’s work. He might have written about a farm in the abstract, one that could be anywhere.

That might seem the more obvious way to say something large: couch it in general terms and thereby make it representative. Why would someone from Durham, or from Tennessee, be interested in Hampshire? We may as well ask how it is that they come to care about an old Roman bridge in Northamptonshire as it looks to John Clare or about Hardy’s Egdon Heath. To inhabit another person’s place, to

ALE X ANDR A HARRIS

grasp its scale and rhythm, to set out towards its horizon, reminds us – and each reminder is a revelation – of that extraordinary fact, the one we can never finally fathom, that each life is the centre point of a world.

The neighbour, the teacher, the carer, the view we see from the window each morning, the bus stop, the bench: these may become the objects of our most quotidian and outlandish feelings. They are often so familiar as to be almost invisible, but they are also, in a strange double action, overwhelmingly present and larger than life. The garden wall is not simply a wall but the wall, both taken for granted and irreplaceable. Stanley Spencer found the compost heap of his home in the Berkshire village of Cookham worth painting: one strong arm thrusts up the corrugated iron cover, while the other tips a vaseful of wilted daffodils onto the pile. He moved on to wonder at the dustbin of a house down the road, replete with cabbage tops and scraped-out tins, the heaped remnants of the routines that make up the fabric of each day. Spencer’s people, though they are often taking flight or at least appearing like heavenly visions from upstairs windows, are painted with a heaviness that declares their absolute realness – physically, spiritually, emotionally. There is no passing them by. Here is Elsie Munday, forceful and sensuous, bringing in the washing.

Or think of Dylan Thomas in the tenderly comical, hushed, hallowed survey of the sleeping small town in Under Milk Wood. It is thick with the physicality of a real and particular place, “petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall”, all the paraphernalia of “postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman”. Local people and things – people and things

in relation to each other – take on monumental proportions. We see them magnified, sometimes even magnificent. We feel and hear them: Thomas draws in close enough “to hear their dreams”.

Norris chooses for Nightfall an epigraph from Thomas’s poem ‘Fern Hill’. Insofar as a play can have an epigraph (words unvoiced by anyone on stage, but there in the text or programme like a tutelary spirit watching over the whole), Nightfall bears at its head these last lines of the poem: Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

‘Fern Hill’ calls up the expansive comfort of childhood days on a family farm. Thomas rocks himself and his reader back into delightfully complacent abandon. “Now as I was young and easy”, he begins – casually conflating the ‘now’ and the past. The ‘now’ is a sigh or a click of the fingers with which readily available memory can be summoned on the instant and made habitable. We lie down in it, as in a rocking hammock, lulled by the images of confidence and plenty that roll and break over us. But simultaneously we see that ease from a distance, irrecoverable. “Time held me green and dying”. The clock was ticking from the start.

Mercy? Norris’s people are at the mercy of so many things: time, place, grief, the economy and the labour market. And ease: where is that now?

ALEXANDRA HARRIS, APRIL 2018 Alexandra Harris is the author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland, and is Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. She has a special interest in the history of responses to place.

W

hen I was growing up, I worked in bars and cafĂŠs in the Wiltshire city of Salisbury with people who, in many cases, had to wear themselves through to pay the rent.

What I felt about us all, observing the people around me who supported families on the minimum wage, who had left their homes behind and crossed the world with astonishing bravery in search of opportunity, who put their bodies through the wringer at weekends because the unhappinesses of their working weeks needed to be violently shaken off, was that our lives had been hijacked.

What seemed to have been stolen from us were our dreams.

Firstly because the struggle for money consumed our energy, creativity and intelligence, and filled up the horizon of our ambition. Secondly, because we were continually bombarded by images designed to offer us the possibility of relief from the pressure of that struggle, on every billboard and every screen, so

RANSOM NOTE Barney Norris

that we had to fight to stop those images affecting and shaping the aspirations we were still able to form for ourselves.

We all knew it was happening. We viewed with wry detachment the fact that our lives had been stolen, and our days seemed to be filled with paying the ransom to get them back. But plotting a route out of that situation was a very difficult thing to do.

This was the reason I started writing. I wanted to tell stories about the people who have to fight to exert any agency over what becomes of their lives, because of the circumstances of their birth and the social moment in which they live. The people who live their lives in a state of continuous exhaustion, because no one will pay them enough, because they can’t break out of this life they’re in. The hijacked. I

BARNE Y NORRIS

believed telling these stories might contribute to challenging the predicament so many of my friends and family found themselves in.

We live in a country that has been stolen from its people. Stolen by a political class, stolen by a monopoly capitalism that locks us into wage brackets while leaving the cost of living to go wherever the wind blows, stolen by the swamping homogeneity of middle-class white western taste and the deluge of socially and behaviourally normalising expectations poured on us by the promotional materials of multinational corporations, everywhere we look.

We live lives that have been stolen from us. Our individuality, our models of aspiration and behaviour, our fantasies and heresies, all are distorted and driven by a mid-Atlantic mean of expectation designed to make people want the same things as each other, and thereby turn them into more efficient markets. We allow everything we think to be recorded, because in our atomised, exhausted modern urban communities, social media was welcomed as a route out of loneliness, and its potential for turning all our secrets into someone else’s property didn’t seem as important as that.

There was a social moment when we felt we owned a little of this place ourselves; we constructed a society out of a shattered country that was designed to be shared, a common wealth. Now the people who made that possible for us are going, and the pillars of that society are crumbling. Education, healthcare, welfare, policing, housing, libraries, the arts, all have been systematically underfunded for a decade, in order to create a situation where they are sufficiently ineffective that the public will stomach seeing them sold off into private ownership.

That was the opportunity people saw in the last recession.

I remember the night after Hurricane Katrina, I served the chief executive of a well known supermarket in the bar at Salisbury

Playhouse, and he said to me, “a lot of people are going to make a lot of money there, now they can get the blacks out.” It’s no great revelation about the way capital thinks, not really – but I don’t think you ever forget the first time you hear it stated unambiguously.

That’s what’s happening to England now. No more of these old, inefficient, indigenous quirks – we’re going to put it all up for sale.

And who knows, maybe it will make life better for us all in the long run, maybe we will become a more efficient and productive world. But in the meantime, in the transition stage, people are still paying the ransoms for their lives.

What is to be done? The most important step, it seems to me, in recovering a little dignity is to foster different dreams that we can live by. We must reject the idea of a reality where there is only one kind of life to aspire to, one kind of success, one kind of happiness, the one sold in the adverts. That is how we’re hijacked. That is how we end up working for money, and not for ourselves.

It is an effacement of the individuality and potential of human beings, done for the sake of profit, based on making everyone secretly believe they are not good enough. If we want to claim back a little of our liberty and our sovereignty, we can start by laughing out of town the idea that some people don’t fit the template as well as others, and question whether there is really any kind of template at all. We can insist that every person is of value, that their value is pinned to nothing other than the fact they exist, and that everyone’s story deserves to be given the same respect, the same hearing. We can live in defiance of cultural homogeneity. Not because we’re hippies who just want everyone to love everyone, but rather because promulgating a diversity of aspiration is the only sure defence against the homogenising impulses in our society that whittle our aspirations down so small, and limit the potential of so many.

Storytelling is not a marginal or luxury activity. Our dreams determine all our actions. Everything anyone achieves is the result of an ambition, a strategy, a plan. So it’s at the level of narrative – the level at which we dream up the achievements of our lives in the first place – that the battle to recover our dignity must be fought.

This is why I try in my work to give voice to people who steer by different stars, whose values head off at tangents from the mainstream. Because a lot has been said in recent years about taking back control, but most of it struck me as misdirection. Real sovereignty, real liberty starts with the lives we are willing to give attention to, and treat as the centre of the world for the duration of an evening.

BARNEY NORRIS, APRIL 2018

SIGHTLINES

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet, Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first, Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

G K CHESTERTON (1874–1936), FROM ‘THE SECRET PEOPLE’

...The chasm of the sky above my head Is heaven’s profoundest azure; no domain For fickle, short-lived clouds to occupy, Or to pass through, but rather an abyss In which the everlasting stars abide; And whose soft gloom, and boundless depth, might tempt The curious eye to look for them by day.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770–1850), FROM THE EXCURSION, BOOK III: ‘ DESPONDENCY’

“I don’t know where we get this idea that the countryside is unchanging. It’s atomised and isolated. It’s overlooked and undervalued.

But it’s violently changing beneath our noses.”

AMANDA CRAIG, 2017

SIGHTLINES

‘Why do you stand in the dripping rye, Cold-lipped, unconscious, wet to the knee, When there are firesides near?’ said I. ‘I told him I wished him dead,’ said she.

‘Yea, cried it in my haste to one Whom I had loved, whom I well loved still; And die he did. And I hate the sun, And stand here lonely, aching, chill; ‘Stand waiting, waiting under skies That blow reproach, the while I see The rooks sheer off to where he lies Wrapt in a peace withheld from me.’

THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928), ‘THE WOMAN IN THE RYE’

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away through ninety dark degrees; the bureau lies on the wall and thoughts that were recumbent in the day rise as the others fall, stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.

ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979), FROM ‘SLEEPING STANDING UP’

I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing; Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, not any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.

EDWARD THOMAS (1878–1917), FROM ‘OLD MAN’

There is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly … the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food;” it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.

Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, it is surely meant for the chief teacher of what is immortal in us, as it is the chief minister of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought.

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900), FROM MODERN PAINTERS, VOL. I

SIGHTLINES

Close up the casement, draw the blind, Shut out that stealing moon, She wears too much the guise she wore Before our lutes were strewn With years-deep dust, and names we read On a white stone were hewn.

Step not out on the dew-dashed lawn To view the Lady’s Chair, Immense Orion’s glittering form, The Less and Greater Bear: Stay in; to such sights we were drawn When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents That come forth lingeringly, And wake the same sweet sentiments They breathed to you and me When living seemed a laugh, and love All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room Prison my eyes and thought; Let dingy details crudely loom, Mechanic speech be wrought: Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom, Too tart the fruit it brought!

THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928), ‘SHUT OUT THAT MOON’

REHE ARSAL PHOTOGR APHS BY MANUEL HARL AN

Ophelia Lovibond, Sion Daniel Young and Ukweli Roach

NIGHTFALL CAST

Sion Daniel Young , Laurie Sansom and Ukweli Roach

Ophelia Lovibond

Ukweli Roach

THEATRE includes The Stepmother at Chichester; The Libertine in the West End; and The Effect at Sheffield Crucible.

TRAINING RADA.

LOU

TELEVISION includes Hooten & the Lady, Elementary, W1A, Inside No. 9, Mr Sloane, The Poison Tree, Titanic: Blood & Steel and FM. FILM includes Tommy’s Honor, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Man Up, Guardians of the Galaxy, A Single Shot, Gozo, Mr Popper’s Penguins, No Strings Attached, 4,3,2,1, Chatroom, London Boulevard, Nowhere Boy, Shadows in the Sun, Popcorn and Oliver Twist.

PETE

THEATRE includes Wig Out! and 5, 6, 7, 8 at the Royal Court; and Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe.

TELEVISION includes Humans, Hard Sun, Blindspot, Dickensian, The Royals, Grantchester, Silk, Drifters, Starlings, Monroe and Eternal Law. FILM includes Streetdance 3D, One Day and Venus and the Son.

Sion Daniel Young RYAN

Claire Skinner JENNY

THEATRE includes Mrs Affleck, The Winter’s Tale, Othello, Blurred Lines and Invisible Friends at the National Theatre; Measure for Measure for the RSC; The Father at The Tricycle and Wyndham’s; The Importance of Being Earnest at the Aldwych; The Glass Menagerie at the Donmar and Comedy; Moonlight at the Almeida and Comedy; Deathtrap at the Noël Coward; and, most recently, Rabbit Hole and Prism at Hampstead.

TELEVISION includes Outnumbered, Next of Kin, Power Monkeys, Inside No. 9, Critical, Mr Understood and Doctor Who. She is soon to be seen in a new adaptation of Vanity Fair.

FILM includes Life Is Sweet and Naked.

TRAINING Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

THEATRE includes Killology at the Royal Court; War Horse (also West End and NT Live) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the National Theatre; Mametz and The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning for National Theatre Wales; The Welsh Boy at Theatre Royal Bath; and Llwyth (Tribe) at the Sherman, Cardiff.

TELEVISION includes The Commoners, Hinterland, Our World War, Casualty, Tissues and Issues and Gwaith Cartref.

FILM includes Another Me, Private Peaceful and Daisy Chain.

RADIO includes Bisgits a Balaclafas, Hoshiko, Inside Information and Doll’s Tea Set.

REHE ARSAL S

Sion Daniel Young

Ophelia Lovibond

REHE ARSAL S

Ukweli Roach

Claire Skinner

NIGHTFALL PRODUC TION

Barney Norris WRITER

Barney Norris was born in Sussex in 1987.

After leaving university he founded the touring theatre company Up in Arms with the director Alice Hamilton. His plays include While We’re Here (Up in Arms, Bush, Farnham and tour); Echo’s End (Salisbury Playhouse); Eventide (Up In Arms, Arcola and tour) and Visitors (Up in Arms, Arcola, Bush and tour; winner of the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright). His novels Turning For Home and the bestselling Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain are published by Transworld, and his non-fiction books The Wellspring: Conversations with David Owen Norris and To Bodies Gone: The Theatre of Peter Gill are published by Seren. He is the Martin Esslin playwright in residence at Keble College, Oxford.

Laurie Sansom DIRECTOR

From 2012 to 2016 Laurie Sansom was Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the National Theatre of Scotland. Whilst there, he directed The James Plays trilogy

by Rona Munro, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2014 before transferring to the National Theatre in London, where it won the Evening Standard and Writers’ Guild Awards for Best Play. In 2015 he directed his own adaptation of The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, and The 306: Dawn, a new site-specific piece of music theatre telling the stories of the 306 British soldiers soldiers executed for cowardice in the First World War. Previously, he was Artistic Director of Royal & Derngate, Northampton, where he directed the European premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Spring Storm and Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, both transferring to the National Theatre.

He also directed new versions of The Bacchae, Blood Wedding and Hedda Gabler as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad; Frankenstein (with Frantic Assembly); The Duchess of Malfi, Follies and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

He has directed for theatres around the UK, including the Traverse, Edinburgh; Birmingham Rep; Salisbury Playhouse; Lyric Hammersmith; New Vic, Stoke on Trent; West Yorkshire Playhouse; and the National Theatre, London, where he directed the world premiere of The Holy Rosenbergs.

At the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, where he was Associate Director to Alan Ayckbourn, he directed over 20 new plays, including Villette (with Frantic

Assembly) and a micro-musical season comprising three new musicals. His Watford Palace production of Dangerous Corner was re-staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and transferred to the West End in 2002.

He has recently directed a new adaptation of Kiss of the Spiderwoman at the Menier Chocolate Factory, and later in the year will direct Genesis Inc at Hampstead Theatre.

Rae Smith DESIGNER

THEATRE includes Macbeth, St George and the Dragon, Barbershop Chronicles, wonder. land, The Light Princess, War Horse (also West End, New York, and UK and world tours, winning Tony and Olivier Awards) and This House (also West End and UK tour) for the National Theatre, where she will shortly design Translations; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at West Yorkshire Playhouse; Girl from the North Country at the Old Vic and in the West End; The Goat in the West End; and Stella at Brighton Festival, Hoxton Hall and Holland Festival.

OPERA includes Pelleas and Mellisande for Scottish Opera; Cavelleria Rusticana and Pagliacci at the Met, New York; Benvenuto Cellini at ENO; and The Rain Cycle at Opera du Rhin, which won the Grand Prix for outstanding achievement in Opera.

DANCE The Tempest and Prince of the Pagodas for Birmingham Royal Ballet; and The Rite of Spring/Petrushka for Fabulous Beast.

OTHER WORK includes live drawing for War Horse in performance with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. raesmith.co.uk

Chris Davey LIGHTING DESIGNER

Chris Davey has designed extensively for Shared Experience, the Royal Court, Hampstead Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, Royal Exchange Manchester, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, Citizens’ Theatre Glasgow, Birmingham Rep and Manchester International Festival.

THEATRE For the National Theatre: Or You Could Kiss Me, Beyond the Horizon, Spring Storm, Harper Regan, The Seagull, Pillars of the Community, A Dream Play, Iphigenia at Aulis, War and Peace, Baby Doll and The Colour of Justice.

For the RSC: Titus Andronicus, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline, Alice

in Wonderland, Night of the Soul, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Everyman (both also in New York), A Month in the Country, Troilus and Cressida, The Comedy of Errors (world tour), Mysteria and Easter.

Theatre also includes Witness for the Prosecution at County Hall, London; The Best Man at the Playhouse, London; Rhinoceros at Edinburgh International Festival; Vamos Cuba! at Sadler’s Wells; Sweeney Todd at La Monnaie, Brussels; 42nd Street at the Châtelet, Paris; Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man; Lord of the Flies at Sadler’s Wells and national and international tours; The Driver’s Seat for National Theatre of Scotland; Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection at the Coliseum, Royal Albert Hall and world tour; and High Society, Wonderful Town, The History Boys and Dial M for Murder on national tour.

OPERA includes Madame Butterfly in Oslo; Queen of Spades for Opera North; Romeo et Juliette for Opera Ireland; L’Heure Espagnole, La Voix Humaine and Hippolyte et Aricie for Nationale Reisopera Netherlands; L’Arbore di Diana in Valencia; I Capuleti E I Montecchi for Opera North, Melbourne and Sydney Opera House; Skellig at The Sage Gateshead; Aida in Houston; Bird of Night at the Royal Opera House; Bluebeard in Bregenz; Jephtha for Copenhagen/ENO/Welsh National Opera; The Magic Flute and Sweeney Todd for Welsh National Opera; eight seasons for Grange Park Opera; Les Illuminations, The Turn of the Screw and The Rake’s Progress for Aldeburgh Festival; and The Picture of Dorian Gray in Monte Carlo.

Christopher Shutt SOUND DESIGNER

TRAINING Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

THEATRE includes Frozen in the West End; John, Man and Superman, The James Plays, From Morning to Midnight, The Effect, War Horse, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, Happy Days, Coram Boy, Not About Nightingales and Machinal at the National Theatre; Hamlet (with Benedict Cumberbatch) at the Barbican; The Entertainer, Romeo and Juliet and Winter’s Tale for the Kenneth Branagh Season at the Garrick; Wild at Hampstead; The Father in the West End; Love & Information at the Royal Court and NY Theatre Workshop; Macbeth at Manchester International Festival and Park Avenue Armory, New York; Drum Belly at the Abbey, Dublin; Knives in Hens, Saint Joan, Faith Healer, Privacy, Philadelphia Here I Come, Piaf and The Man Who Had All the Luck at the Donmar; Twilight Zone, The Treatment, Ruined and Judgment Day at the Almeida; Sewing Group, profoundly affectionate…, hang, Kin, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Serious

Money and Road at the Royal Court; Bull at the Young Vic and off-Broadway; All My Sons on Broadway; Macbeth, Oppenheimer, Wendy and Peter Pan, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, King John and Romeo and Juliet for the RSC; A Disappearing Number, The Elephant Vanishes, Mnemonic, Street of Crocodiles and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol for Complicité; and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Al Pacino, music by Tom Waits, on Broadway.

AWARDS Tony Award for War Horse; Drama Desk Awards for War Horse, Mnemonic and Not About Nightingales; Olivier Award nominations for Hamlet, The Father, War Horse, Coram Boy, Piaf and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

Gareth Williams MUSIC

Originally from Northern Ireland, Gareth Williams is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art. His compositions seek to find new participants, collaborators and audiences for new opera and music theatre, and to explore ideas of vulnerability through vocal writing.

Williams was Composer in Residence at Scottish Opera from 2011 to 2014. During this time, he created a series of operas and projects, including Breath Cycle, at the respiratory ward of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, where he wrote songs, ensemble pieces and opera specifically for patients with cystic fibrosis, who weren’t allowed in the same room as one another.

OPERA & MUSIC THEATRE He is conductor and musical director of NOISE opera, where he composes operas with collaborators who are new to the genre, for example, the patrons of the oldest bar in Glasgow, a Shetland fiddler and indie band Admiral Fallow. Rocking Horse Winner, produced by Tapestry Opera, a chamber opera, adapted by librettist Anna Chatterton from a short story by DH Lawrence, had its premiere in Toronto in 2016, and was nominated for nine Dora Mavor Moore Awards, winning five, including Outstanding Musical Production.

A new production will premiere at Saratoga Opera in 2018. Since 2015, Williams has been collaborating with Oliver Emanuel to create The 306: Trilogy – a music theatre trilogy about the British soldiers shot for cowardice in the First World War, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, in partnership with 14–18 Now! The final part of the trilogy, 306 Dusk, will have its premiere in October 2018.

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NIGHTFALL PROUC TION RADIO At BBC Radio Scotland, Williams regularly contributes to Classics Unwrapped, presenting new classical music to a wider audience, and he is a presenter on BBC Radio 3.

Ian William Galloway VIDEO DESIGNER

Ian William Galloway is a designer and director working with all forms of video and projection for live performance.

THEATRE includes Mosquitoes at the National Theatre; Singin’ in The Rain, Gypsy and Elf: The Musical in the West End; Schikaneder at Raimund Theatre, Vienna; Wendy and Peter Pan and The Gods Weep for the RSC; The Absence of War, Spring Awakening and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Headlong; Oh! What A Lovely War at Theatre Royal Stratford East; Beautiful Burnout and Lovesong for Frantic Assembly; Macbeth and The Missing for National Theatre of Scotland; Amadeus at Chichester Festival Theatre; The Graduate and Enjoy at West Yorkshire Playhouse; The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning and Mother Courage and her Children for National Theatre Wales; Hapgood at Hampstead; Est-ce Que Tu Dors? for Festival d’Avignon/ Complicité; and The Tempest and The Lion in Winter at Theatre Royal Haymarket.

OPERA includes La Fanciulla del West at La Scala; Madame Butterfly at Glyndebourne; Hansel and Gretel for Opera North; Agrippina for Theatr an der Wien; The Marriage of Figaro for ENO; Eugene Onegin for ENO and Metropolitan Opera; Faust at the Mariinsky; The Flying Dutchman for Scottish Opera; Juliette and Where the Wild Things Are for Bremer Oper; The Lion’s Face and Seven Angels for The Opera Group; Hotel de Pekin for Nationale Reisopera Netherlands; and Sancta Susanna and Von Heute auf Morgen for Opéra de Lyon.

He works as part of Mesmer, a collective of video and projection designers working across theatre, dance, music, fashion and art.

Songs used in Nightfall ‘La Belle Dame Sans Regrets’ (Sting, Miller) UMG Recordings Inc ‘Never Going Back Again’ (Buckingham) Warner Bros ‘Rollercoaster’ (Thorn, Watt) Buzzin’ Fly Records/Chrysalis ‘The Chain’ (McVie, McVie, Fleetwood, Nicks) Warner Bros ‘Fastlove, Pt. 1’ (Michael Washington, Rushen, McFadden) Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ (Wexler, King, Goffin) Atlantic Records/ Rhino Entertainment Company/Warner Music Group Company