Reunions of bands are always of interest dramatically.  I wonder whether any playwright will write about the reconciliation of the Gallagher brothers in Oasis next year? Alice Hamilton directed Neil d’Souza’s likeable play Out of Season at Hampstead six months ago about a band meeting up in Ibiza.  Alice Hamilton and Barney Norris were in the theatre group Up in Arms after meeting in a youth theatre in Salisbury.

In The Band Back Together there will be two stories for each band member of then and now and filling in what was in between.  This is set in Salisbury, that idyllic West Country English city with its historic cathedral, traumatised in 2018 by the attempted poisoning of a Russian dissident and his daughter by Russian agents. 

What is delightfully different about Barney Norris’s three is how quirkily different the first two we meet are.  Joe (James Westphal) is the drummer and drummers are stereotyped as being somehow different.  The band seems to have been the highlight of his youth.  Since then he has had a sad marriage and cared for his unfaithful wife after they had separated, when she was dying.  His first love was music, the band and Ellie (Laura Evelyn).  

Joe is very underconfident, shy and unassuming yet he has courageously summoned the other two band members to rehearse for a one night only show advertised as benefitting a Novichok victims’ charity.  Joe is no longer in music as a career but working in a shop selling computer game models.  Arriving first is the band’s vocalist Ellie who looks striking and is much taller than Joe.  She is the most awkward character, zany with a gift for putting every possible foot in it. She is infuriating and disconcerting for anyone she is talking to, but she makes us laugh at how unaware she is of the impact of her own words.