This Sunday sit down, we chatted to local poet Lewis Buxton about his new show FRIEND, which is stopping at Norwich Theatre Stage Two this month. We talked about how creativity can be found anywhere, going for a walk to get ideas and joining a football team.
Tell us a little about you.
Hello! I’m Lewis Buxton – I write poems and stories and theatre shows. I live in Norwich with my wife and a small dog called Frankie.
Tell me a little about your show, Friend.
Friend is your average guy’s guide to making new friends. It is a story that follows a year in the life of a man who has just turned 30, moved to a new city, and realised he doesn’t really have any friends. So he forms a 5-a-side football team. From there on in, he thinks about socialising, sitcoms and sport, all through the lens of his social anxiety. It’s a show for everyone but particularly for any men who’ve ever found themselves feeling a bit alone.
Describe the show in three words.
Funny, kind, thoughtful.
What should the audience expect?
Expect a one man sit com episode. Think Chandler Bing in series four of Friends, alone on stage and thinking about being a goalkeeper. But the show is also a conversation, it’s just me on stage talking to the audience and trying to figure out what makes a good friend.
What inspired you to write about friends?
Mostly my own friends. A lot of the story is true: I moved to Norwich not really knowing anyone, joined a football team, and found some really brilliant people to hang out with. I wanted to capture the peculiarity of my friends: the way Tom drives his Ford Fiesta; the way Carl runs like a wounded gazelle; the way Matt talks about how much he loves his wife. It all seemed so interesting and tender, yet complicated. I wanted to capture the conversations I have on the sidelines and in pubs with millennial men.
How did you become a poet?
Mostly, because I wasn’t good enough to be a footballer. Those are the two categories of jobs, right? Advanced athlete or lonely writer? Seriously though, I was in a field in Suffolk and saw some incredible poets on a festival stage: John Osborne (whose show you should go and see soon after mine), Hannah Jane Walker, Ross Sutherland, Bohdan Piasecki, Hannah Lowe, all made me think I could get up on a stage and read a poem out to people.
Where do you start writing poems?
Usually in a notebook stained in midnight tears and cups of tea. Everyone starts differently, but that’s how it happened to me. I had always written poems, stories, thoughts in a notebook since I was very young. I think it comes from anxiety and experiencing mental illness from a young age: I have a compulsion to write and to remember things, and poems seemed like a good and relatively healthy way to doing that.
Does a poem feel different when you perform it rather than just read it? Do you have a preference?
Only in the same way that a song feels different live than on the radio. They exist on a spectrum of artistic expression: there is an intimacy to reading something alone, you feel you are being spoken to directly rather than have a collective experience. Whereas if you perform a poem to 300 people it’s more communal, more about holding everyone in the room together.
What are your tips to get over writer’s block
I’m not really a writer’s block kind of guy. I’m not entirely sure it exists. People (and external forces like money, careers, peers, Instagram) put pressure on artists to create stuff in a ‘productive’ or ‘regular’ way that fits in with our idea of one’s working life: e.g you write 1000 words a day for 100 days, and suddenly you have a novel, and if you can’t do that you’ve got ‘writer’s block’. But that equates writing to a sort of factory line practice, one that is about goals and targets, goals and ultimately the capitalist idea of why we write (i.e to make money or create products). If you were making bicycles in the 19th century in a factory and you said, ‘Oh, today just doesn’t feel right to put spokes into a wheel’, that wouldn’t be considered an excuse, but it is a reason people can’t or shouldn’t want to create art. But actually we write or create for a bunch of other far more interesting reasons like connection or expression or rebellion. So I wonder if to get ‘writer’s block’ is really just to feel the weight of a society that isn’t shaped at the moment for the free creation of art. When people say they’ve got writer’s block what I think people mean is that it isn’t the right time for a poem or story to happen, which isn’t something that the society allows for if you are trying to make money and a career for that art form. Also, sometimes going for a walk helps.
You live locally. What inspires you from the creative scene here?
The long and short of it is that Norfolk saved my life. If I hadn’t moved here, I would be in a very different place: the writers who support, love and care for me, the organisations who book, pay and mentor me, the landscapes that hold me in the big-sky arms are all things about Norfolk and its creative scene that keep me going. I love the people, the pubs, the football pitches, the beaches. I’m not sure if we think about ‘Creative Scene’ as widely as we should do: there is creativity everywhere in Norfolk. The way people talk at the bar in the Eaton Cottage, the way coaches design tactics on the sidelines of seven aside football pitches, the way the tide comes in at East Runton beach. All of that is part of the creative scene, and all of it makes me want to write and read.
Lewis is at Norwich Theatre Stage Two with his show FRIEND on 25 Oct. For more information and book, visit norwichtheatre.org or call the Box Office on 01603 630 000.
