‘A Local Habitation and a name…’ – at Wheatfen

For me it always begins with a place; but then as a playwright, my stories require a scene, location and frame. And since the advent of my diptych of plays about climate change The Contingency Plan in 2009, my imagination has toyed with Norfolk again and again, so much so that when I finally moved there three years ago, it felt like a homecoming.

Shakespeare nails it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in Act 5 as Theseus muses on the events the play, he speaks of how, ‘…imagination bodies forth/The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen/Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name’. The dizzying possibilities that attend on the beginning of any project require a kind of grounding and determining the story’s place – real or imagined – for me will determine my story. Theatre of course offers its own further framing, defined by the stage’s constraints; the story begins as the actor enters, it ends as they exit.  Great plays are synonymous with the possibilities of the worlds they create: Chekhov’s unseen orchard in its eponymous play, Caryl Churchill’s Suffolk kitchen gathering in the dizzying conflicts of Top Girls, August Wilson’s fragile front-yard in Fences.

So why is Wheatfen, 9 miles by bike from my house so resonant for me?  Just outside Surlingham at the end of a bumpy track, at first it appears unpromising, adjacent to a plain of water meadow and farmland obscuring the River Yare. Getting there you pass its immediate neighbour Grange Farm, the starting point for my recent show Phoenix Dodo Butterfly, which debuted at NNF in 2024 – a setting so resonant, we actually staged the play in its farmyard under an angry June sky.

But Wheatfen has a deeper taproot in my imagination; this is the site which provoked into being my series for BBC Radio 4 ‘Song of the Reed’ in 2021/22. I would venture here, (sometimes illegally) from distant Cambridge during various lockdowns, and my invented nature reserve Fleggwick drew inspiration from Wheatfen, even if we recorded the show North of the river at RSPB Strumpshaw Broad.  I could speak of its appeal pretentiously as what French philosopher Michel Foucault called as a ‘heterotopia’, an enchanted space defying the wider logic of our cruel and extractive time or as a ‘resource of hope’ in the words of critic Raymond Williams, offering resistance to the crisis in the natural and human world. But that’s not the whole story.

Partially I’m just a sucker for a fen; its unboundedness, its uncertain status between land and water, river and shore, woodland and reedbed. Partially it’s my awareness of the density of imperilled life it holds in its grasp, vulnerable to saline flooding from the all-too-proximate North Sea. Partially it’s my affection for that life: the swallowtail butterfly, the marsh pea, the bittern, the bearded tit.

But Wheatfen’s pull tugs even deeper than that; it offers a dream of habitation, of living in the midst of non-human life.  Since 1948, it’s been the home of the family of legendary Norfolk naturalist Ted Ellis and the source of his acute and lyrical writing and observation. I revere the work of nature conservation but the average nature reserve is inevitably bound by the larger mission of its owner, dotted with signage and amenities and tokens of public engagement. I don’t resent that, but Wheatfen is blissfully free of it and as a consequence, it feels less…public. It feels wild, almost.  I rarely meet anyone here and if I do they share that blissed out state of revery and openness to sky and land and water; within minutes I reach the kind of inwardness so powerfully named at the end of Larkin’s great poem, ‘Here’: ‘Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach’.

I can think at Wheatfen, I can think with Wheatfen. I can imagine. There is a deliquescence in its permeable surfaces, the spring in the sodden black peaty earth, the sudden givings way to water, that slows the visitor down to the tempo of thought.  It offers a kind of theatre of the elements: the way a path suddenly opens up to the vast vantage of the Yare at the reserve’s limits. Or, most powerfully of all, the encounter with Rockland Broad penetrating the reed’s fastness like some neural network.  I sit at its edge on a bench, facing the dark water as if watching a stage pregnant with possibility, the woody shores forming the wings. Who will enter? Who will exit? I am out of time and place and yet embodied in a local habitation and a name. Here is my church. From here the story can begin.