Barney Norris’s play, We Started to Sing, chosen for the re-opening of the Arcola after the pandemic, is a personal tribute to his own family, to his parents, his stepfather, and his grandparents.  Projected onto pleated blinds are home movies which could be from his personal archive.

This is an affectionate portrait of his paternal grandparents keeping in touch with their grandsons after his father leaves the marriage and earns a living as a pianist in America.  Peggy (Barbara Flynn) and Bert (Robin Soans) are the grandparents who are seen at one point providing puppet dramas and playing a barrel organ at village fêtes.  Their son David (David Ricardo-Pearce) does eventually come back from America.

An early scene shows Barnabus’s parents, Fiona (Naomi Petersen) and David arguing and rubbing up each other the wrong way when Peggy and Bert are staying with them in the caravan.  Bert is full of increasingly unlikely stories, tedious for David who has heard them many times, but fresh for Fiona who as yet has not had her disbelief enacted.  Peggy listens patiently. 

As the family moves around the country the video backdrop shows the countryside views or in London the front of the terraced houses. It is in London where Fiona and Peggy first meet after the split.  Fiona has a new man on the scene, the more fatherly Rob (George Taylor).  Fiona sings beautifully and finds her vocation in running a community choir. Fiona has issues with her own mother, so she forms a bond with Peggy.