Arthur and Edie have lived in their Wiltshire farmhouse since they got married half a century ago. They sit in their armchairs and reminisce about holidays and their wedding, happy and comfortable together, but they’re anxious as this is the last day they will spend on their own. Edie is in the early stages of dementia and Arthur is unsteady on his feet, so their son Stephen has arranged for someone to come and look after Edie.

Kate the carer arrives and is friendly, but her haunted eyes hint at problems in her past. Stephen arrives – late – and there is clearly tension between him and his parents.

Barney Morris wrote the play which had its premiere in 2014 and he directs this production, his first at the Watermill since he became its artistic associate in 2019.

Christopher Ravenscroft and Tessa Bell-Briggs excel as Arthur and Edie. Theirs is a gentle love story complicated by uncertainties about their future. Both are concerned about their health; as Edie’s condition deteriorates, she finds comfort singing and joining in with old pop songs from her youth and Arthur is frustrated by his decreasing dexterity.

Nathalie Barclay has a difficult part to play as Kate. She wants to be accepted and needed, and never really gets what she wants from the family. Stephen (Patrick Toomey) has his own agenda, made more complex by bad memories from his childhood and difficulties with his wife.

The set, designed by Good Teeth, is a minimal living room surrounded by and merging with wheat fields. It emphasises the importance of the farm to Arthur, which has been in his family for generations.

The play is cleverly constructed, leading from a peaceful start to a tumultuous end with an uncertain future, but with the enduring love that Arthur and Edie have for each other shining through.

An interesting and thought-provoking production with a top class cast, well suited to the Watermill’s stage.

PAUL SHAVE

Elegiac reflections on love, ageing and Thermos flasks

Transcendence and Thermos flasks don’t often feature in the same sentence, but in Barney Norris’s poignant depiction of old age there’s a defiant poetry in everything from the beauty of the Wiltshire landscape to the pleasures of the humble armchair. Arthur and Edie’s lives are at a tipping point; their independence is threatened as dementia encroaches on Edie’s mind, so they decide to stake everything on taking a young stranger into their home.

Visitors is an elegiac reflection on how we’re haunted by paths we did or didn’t take — astonishingly Norris, who also directs, wrote the play a decade ago when he was in his twenties. Though the play is very different from Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem — also set in Wiltshire — it too derives its compelling, unearthly power from fusing pagan aspects of English identity with daily life.

Norris has written that while Jerusalem is a great play about “England’s rebel heart”, for people like him who grew up in Wiltshire, Butterworth’s “high-octane” vision is also an “effacement of our reality”. In Norris’s own assertively low-octane opening we listen as Edie reminisces about a Thermos-fuelled walk she and Arthur once took along a beach, suddenly encountering a bride of wild, goddess-like beauty at the edge of the waves.

The bride is a symbol of what Edie — or anyone else’s marriage — might have been; in this story, as throughout, Tessa Bell-Briggs compellingly distils both her character’s sense of everyday magic and gentle irreverence. One moment she’s joking with Arthur about whether he should have tried LSD. At another she’s describing how she senses the orbit of the earth simply by watching the shifting position of light through the window.

The design by Good Teeth heightens the pagan vibe, with the set dominated by reeds of corn gilded in the light. Arthur and Edie’s farmhouse drawing room sits in the centre, but the corn — like other forces they can’t control — is erupting through the floorboards.

Christopher Ravenscroft brings gritty charm to Arthur’s despair, trying to pretend everything is normal as he watches his wife’s memories slip away. As Kate, the Janis Joplin-singing blue-haired stranger who comes to live with them, Nathalie Barclay displays a spiky, idiosyncratic humour as she discovers unexpected kinship with the couple in her search to make meaning of her life.

Patrick Toomey’s Steve deftly handles the least sympathetic role as the couple’s insurance-broker son — though he markets certainty, he is the most lost. We’re left not so much with the sense of an ending as the infinite nature both of the landscape and the relationships it sustains.

RACHEL HALLIBURTON

Searing study of ageing family frictions

Young authors’ work often deals with youth, due to the solipsism of early adulthood and writing school injunctions to self-dramatise. So one startling aspect of Visitors, at its premiere in 2014, was the mid-20s Barney Norris creating searingly detailed and compassionate portraits of a septuagenarian couple fretting about paths chosen and imposed.

Since that debut, Norris has produced four novels, including The Vanishing Hours, and numerous theatrical pieces, most recently The Wellspring, an affecting speech-and-music memoir. High on any list of the best younger British writers, he now, with a self-directed revival of Visitors, sets the sometimes stressful test of whether a first work has lasted.

On the edge of Salisbury Plain, Edie’s memories begin to slip, as her husband, Arthur, stubbornly tends the land that has been in the family for three generations but is not wanted by the fourth, Stephen, a Swindon insurance broker. Unable to fund professional help for his parents either at home or in a “home”, the son finds, from an online startup, Kate, a university graduate drifting between professions, as a sort of end-of-life au pair.

The preoccupation in Norris’s plays and novels with time and ageing and England invoke Philip Larkin, and Visitors alarmingly dramatises the poet’s fears in Aubade about lives becoming trapped in “wrong beginnings”. Edie laments that the young don’t know “which life to choose” and the old are haunted by having completed the wrong one. Each of the characters feels that they could have done or might yet do something else.

Norris’s dialogue exposes lives in a line or even a word. Edie, shown a recent photograph of a rarely seen teenage granddaughter, remarks how much the girl resembles her mother. Stephen’s reply, “Scowling,” blares marital tensions. Parent-son dynamics are ingeniously shown in a running gag about how – and how well – each tells jokes.

A marvellous cast radiate the pain of things said and unsaid across the years. Tessa Bell-Briggs’ Edie agonisingly embodies the stage of dementia in which someone knows what they are losing. Christopher Ravenscroft’s Arthur wears twinkly optimism to shield a less kind man inside. As Kate, Nathalie Barclay’s perky wish to be accepted into this home hints at rejection from others. Patrick Toomey’s Stephen chillingly takes his parents’ lives and marriage as an affront to his own.

A play’s first major revival indicates whether it is heading for the remainder table or the repertoire: it’s the latter trajectory, on this evidence, for Visitors.

MARK LAWSON

Moving tribute to love

Plaudits as Barney Norris directs his Visitors revival at The Watermill

Visitors, written and deftly directed by Barney Norris, is a beguiling story that movingly explores family relationships and dementia. It premiered in 2014, when Norris was in his mid-20s.

Set on a farm on Salisbury Plain, designers Good Teeth have created the rustic, harsh atmosphere of country living.

There are cornstalks growing either side of the stage and armchairs built for comfort fill the room, with a television in the corner.

James Whiteside’s golden lighting hints of halcyon days from the past when Arthur and his wife Edie were younger and healthy. But now in their 70s life has become challenging as Edie, superbly acted by Tessa Bell-Briggs, is suffering from dementia and Arthur, impressively played by Christopher Ravenscroft, is finding it difficult to cope. Their loving relationship is heart-rending.

Help comes from the young blue-haired graduate Kate (Nathalie Barclay), the au pair who not only becomes Edie’s carer, but part of the family. She is on a journey of discovery trying to make her way in today’s confusing world.

The relationship between Kate and Edie develops with both kindness and understanding, despite Edie’s dementia taking control of her mind with mood swings that change from lucid memories of her early life, wedding day and life on the farm to moments of total confusion and frustration. Yet there are moments of courage and dignity as she accepts her situation.

Arthur’s stoicism as he cares for his wife while remembering post-war England, where “they used to hang paper bags on a nail over the fireplace” is touching. A remarkable poignant performance.

Patrick Toomey is the wayward son Stephen, who plans to put his mother in a home and sell the farm. He rejected the opportunity to take over the family farm and instead chose the apparently safe career of a life insurance salesman. But his marriage is now in tatters and divorce is imminent.

He is struggling to reconcile his relationship with his parents and seeking a new future for himself with apprehension and uncertainty, but is still supported by his loving mother.

This is an uplifting, emotionally charged production that is simply outstanding. Not to be missed.

ROBIN STRAPP