Plan(et) B

A Stranger Comes To Town

A proposal for a theatre piece by Barney Norris

I want to create a piece designed to tour round village halls on Mull this winter.

When visiting Mull recently, I was inspired by the work of local sculptor Charlotte Mellis on South African township building – she creates beautiful ceramic structures replicating the structures people build out of reclaimed materials in South African townships. She and I share an interest in South Africa, and we discussed our experiences there together.

What these works made me contemplate, in the specific context of Mull, was transience, ephemerality. Mull is a landscape which evokes deep time – it remembers the world before people changed it, and anticipates the world when the impact of people has ebbed. Yet it is also an island full of ruins, a place that records the traces of waves of settlement and clearance, in ways which are effaced in busier, more densely populated places.

My piece would be about this counterpointing of the lasting and the natural with the man-made and the transient. I propose to work with Charlotte Mellis to create a structure out of reclaimed materials -the cardboard packaging and wooden palettes which transport various goods to the people of Mull – and then to create a show that emerges from that structure wherever it tours. This structure would be erected inside village halls, and a phone would be connected inside it. When an audience came to interact with the structure, the phone would start to ring, until someone went to answer it, at which point they would begin to receive instructions – they might be asked to read out a piece of text, or to press play on various cassette players which would play music and unspool a narrative around the shed. They should also be asked to pin a story of their own time on Mull to the side of the shed, a trace of their own passing through this place, so that the shed would ‘gain weight’ as it toured, gathering more stories of transience and ephemerality, of blow-ins passing through this place and leaving their small traces. The precise details of the performance need writing, and will be refined if the project is green-lit, but this is the broad territory I imagine.

The text which might be read out, or played out on cassettes, might well draw on stories of Columba and Oran. I have this idea that their faith was a stranger that came to town; that the island’s history is one of welcome, of accepting guests. I quite like the idea of the whole piece emerging as having been written by someone buried under the shed! The guest entombed in the hearth. But until I write it, I don’t know why that wouldn’t be weird and disturbing and macabre, so we’ll see. But to conclude – my vision is for a touring cardboard shed with a phone in it, and several cassette players, which tells a story to an audience in durational time, most likely without a live performer. The story would also enlist the audience, who would be asked to write small stories of their own and pin them to the shed to leave a trace there.

In Germany, there’s an organ that’s playing a piece by John Cage which is due to last several thousand years before it’s completed. In London, there’s a tower where a machine has been playing a piece of music on singing bowls since the last day of 1999. These works inspire me. I want to make a piece which points out that we, people, are also instruments playing a song – we are performing our music on Mull by passing through the place. Somehow, I want the show to try and get at that.