We Started to Sing

I wish there could be a day where families came together and just said it all to each other. Because then everyone would know it all, and there'd be nothing left to hurt anyone. Sussex. London. Wiltshire. Northamptonshire. Wales. Over three decades, a family spreads across the country, and the chord they made together starts to fray, the distance between them changing the music of their lives. Barney Norris's We Started to Sing is a love song to the people who raised him, and a hymn to the bravery of our brief lives. The play premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in May 2022.

Barney Norris's work has received awards from the International Theatre Institute, the Critics' Circle, the Evening Standard, the Society of Authors and the South Bank Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Awards, among others, and been translated into nine languages. His plays include Visitors, Eventide, Nightfall, The Wellspring and adaptations of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Lorca's Blood Wedding; his novels include Undercurrent and Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain. He will be the Green Party candidate for his home town of Salisbury at the 2024 general election.