Writers and Performers: Calum Maclean, Jack Firoozan, Henrie Allen and Mungo Russell
Director: Joe Warwick
‘Faceless Days’ is a fledgling band, still rehearsing out of a garage and trying to get their break in the music industry. Into their life of band practice, creative arguments, and drunken evenings, Philly, the band’s keyboardist, brings in a new houseplant which she names Norman.
Norman’s Year is a series of vignettes that covers the 12 months of the band following his arrival. It starts well, being introduced to the garage the morning after a major drinking session, but things rapidly descend as the band receive news of a tragedy within their group. This news has dramatic impact and their collective lives spiral. The band undergoes a range of transformations, relationships are pushed to their limits, emotions are running high, and secrets are exposed.
Billed as ‘fast paced and fiercely funny… tragicomedy that illustrates the challenges facing young people trying to make their way in the arts’, Norman’s Year sometimes fails to hit these marks. That’s not to say that it’s bad. It’s not. It’s entertaining and engaging, but it not fast-paced or fiercely funny. It runs at a more meditative pace, with silence being used very effectively to anchor the narrative in the surrounding tragedy. It is funny, sporadically, and that humour is leveraged to help show how collectively and individually the band move on throughout the year.
As a look at the ‘challenges facing young people making their way in the arts’, it fails completely. This is as much a look at these challenges as it is a lesson in playing a guitar. What this is, however, is a touching, frustrating and poignant look at tragedy and how that impacts a closely linked group of friends and how their individual experiences and emotions impact on themselves and the wider group.
The performances are all strong and very naturalistic but Mungo Russell shines as the emotionally strained Benjie. The writing is solid, but the overall narrative is disjointed. This show could have done with either being tighter, giving a more focussed storyline singularly anchored around the tragedy, or being longer giving the characters more chance to develop and offering more context to the presented scenes.
All said, however, Norman’s Year is an entertaining production and, hopefully, a wonderful teaser of a more complete story to come.
Runs until 28 January 2023
