Ben Norris has had a decent career as a poet, actor and writer: notably, he’s played Ben Archer in The Archers since 2018. But in The Distance he looks back to his childhood and deftly sidesteps his future success for a poignant, formally thrilling work that tells an almost true story exquisitely.
As we enter, Norris is jogging at a treadmill, surrounded by a large metal frame. Throughout the show he will alternate running on the treadmill with clambering on the bars, often hanging off them at alarming angles as he tells his tale.
Or, not quite his tale. Although based on true events, it’s a fictionalised version, with a protagonist named Chris, not Ben. As a young teenager in Nottingham, Chris did extraordinarily well in cross county at school, leading to his joining the county’s under-15s running team, a path that would lead him – little by little – to selection by Team GB. Norris’ poetic monologue doesn’t really phrase all this as a story of exuberant youthful triumph, or even obsession, exactly. It’s more that as a young man, he came to an understanding of what he was for.
As his body changed shape – lean and wiry – and he became laser focussed on things like the expensive running shoes he needed to replace at regulated intervals, his life progressed methodically, in a single, clear direction. A relationship with a fellow young athlete is briefly touched upon – she asks him about whether he’s happy and even that doesn”t sound quite right – he simply belongs, doing the things that he is always going to do. Life moves on a logical trajectory, from country to country to Europe, to Team GB – his future is mapped out.
The intensity of what he’s putting himself through gives the work weight
I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to say that Norris did not in fact become an Olympic runner and neither does Chris. Something bad happens and the second half of the play is about what happens when the life you had committed to in mind, body and soul doesn’t happen. He’s a ghost at university – which coincides with the 2012 Olympics that he should have been part of – and in a blessedly unsentimental way it becomes a play about pulling yourself together to go the distance of the rest of your life.
How true is it? I’m assuming broadly so: Norris is a former Team GB athlete. There is clear artistic licence, but there is a core of truth. Moreover, though, the form gives Julia Locascio’s production integrity: not only is the running and climbing testimony to Norris’ athleticism, but the intensity of what he’s putting himself through for us gives the work a weight and seriousness, the sense that in a way he’s putting himself through all this again in front of us. At the same time, it’s not a misery memoir, but rather a thoughtful and moving account of what it is to find your place in the world and what the cost is of starting again.
