Luke Norris on his new Edinburgh play 'Growth' and why lad culture is damaging

The playright and actor's new play 'Growth' is about a young man who discovers a lump on his testicle and puts off seeing a doctor

Norris still sees himself as an Essex lad, which is fundamental to the characters he writes about (Matt Humphrey)

Handsome in spite of at least two weeks of stubble and bloodshot eyes, Luke Norris is slurping coffee in the restaurant where we meet. Coffee is necessary, he says, rubbing his jaw. His newborn daughter is just three weeks old, and enchanting, but very wakeful.

He and his wife took the baby to the Edinburgh Fringe this week to check on his new play Growth, which is there for a month before touring the country. It's at the Roundabout at Summerhall, Paines Plough’s new pop-up theatre that flat packs into a lorry, enabling it to tour to places all around the country, including those that don't often see theatre beyond community am dram groups and Christmas pantos.

But Norris is more keen to chat about the other shows he managed to see on his trip. “We saw I Got Superpowers For My Birthday," he tells me enthusiastically as the coffee kicks in. "Which is really lovely and brilliant and they are throwing all sorts of energy at it.”

Luke Norris will be well-known to fans of Poldark as Dr Dwight Enys and to theatre fans as both an award-winning actor and a playwright. Recently, you might have seen him in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge, directed by Ivo van Hove or Matthew Xia’s revival of Joe Penhall’s production of Blue/Orange, both at the Young Vic .

Luke Norris with David Haig and Daniel Kaluuya in Blue/Orange at the Young Vic (Johan Persson)

His debut play, Goodbye To All That, about a pensionable man leaving his wife for his lover, which he wrote when he was just 26, instantly garnered him entry to the hot new artists-to-watch lists. He has since worked on a steady stream of projects, alternating acting with writing. Yet he rarely does interviews. He says he’s “not that way inclined” and often describes himself as an introvert, but then he also says he doesn’t enjoy the solitary life of a writer, needing the more social practice of acting to balance it out.

“When you’re acting you get to be with people all the time,” he says, “It’s a big part of why I wanted to be an actor because you can be itinerant and fall in love with a different group of people every time you go to work, but it’s less creative because you have to say someone else’s words. Being a writer you sit down and create worlds, but you’re on your own.” I think what he means is he doesn’t like talking about himself, but he has a writer’s ability to take note of other people’s quirks and stories. He asks me nearly as many questions as I ask him.

Norris grew up in Romford and did a few stints in telesales and a year working at B&Q before he got into the Central School of Speech and Drama graduating in 2008. He has since moved to south London, but he still sees himself as an Essex lad, which is fundamental to the characters he writes about.

“It’s important to identify as an Essex boy because the stereotype is so well-established. So when people think of Essex they think of The Only Way Is Essex. So when you are not of that ilk it’s important to stick your hand up as well.”

There is a certain underpinning of lad culture in his plays. His second, So Here We Are, which won the Bruntwood Prize for playwriting, concerns a bunch of male friends who play football and how they behave when their best friend dies unexpectedly. But despite using football as an important element to his work, Norris has no love for the beautiful game.

“As a kid I used to get a rash from polyester football shirts and I was alienated from the group because I wasn’t a very good player.” Instead football and beer serve as a type of shorthand for the laddish culture he wants to explore.

His new play, Growth is about a man who finds a lump on his testicle but puts off going to the doctor for two years. The inspiration for the story came from Norris’s friend, but that's where the similarity ends. The friend discovered a lump, went to the doctor immediately and is now totally fine. “It’s been a turning point for him actually, he is a Christian and it gave him a new perspective on his faith and he joined a men’s group and that has given him a new group of friends who he can talk openly with but he is not the sort of lad that I’ve written into the play, because he is bright enough and worldly enough and cultured enough to know that he’s better off out of that.”

Luke Norris: multitalented (Matt Humphrey)

Needless to say, Norris’s protagonist’s journey is not so simple. “It’s supposed to be a clarion call to make sure people do go and get it checked and I don’t know another play that is saying that,” he says. I ask him about the lad theme, the way his work is about this world of XY chromosomes, pubs and grunts.

“That’s exactly the point of this play and the play before it. It’s about how men identify as men and how that in and of itself is not a useful thing to do. Men are reluctant to seek help when they need it.”

It might sound rather worthy, but like much of his work, it’s done with a light touch. The promo video shows two men drinking pints in a pub, “I need a favour... it’s pretty massive,” says Tobes, the main character, and then, after a long pause; “I need you to feel my balls... please?”

He frequently dismisses this skill by saying any actor will be good at spotting good language – it’s part of the job when sorting through scripts, but very few actors have the knack of producing a tight, conversational, phrase like Norris’s.

“Maybe not, maybe not. But that’s definitely something I’m driving towards.” He aspires to write a bit like Chekov and I think he might manage it. Both concise and sensitive to modern vernacular, his language conveys much with very little.

“The lines could be benign but if you dig a little bit deeper, even with the currency of everyday life every time you open your mouth you are trying to say something and it’s particularly important with a play. I am getting better at honing down how to do that and making something sound ordinary but also saying something else that means more.”

The next play he’s working on is an exciting departure from form. It’s based on how his nan lost his grandad’s ashes and the story focuses on a group of women.

“It’s about how feminism is very difficult for poor people to achieve and that poor people who’ve grown up in a patriarchy don’t recognise their liberties being eroded. That makes it sound very worthy but it’s not, it’s really a comedy about a woman losing her husband’s ashes."

And did they ever find his grandad’s ashes? “They’ve been recovered now, they are in a pot plant and in a cupboard in the hall and partly on the golf course. But what else do you do? If you don't keep them, you scatter them, and they’re gone.”

Paines Plough presents 'Growth', on 4-29 August at the Roundabout at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 0131 560 1580. Growth is then on tour 8 September to 30 October at The Lowry, Salford; Lighthouse, Poole; Theatre Royal, Margate; Lincoln Performing Arts Centre; Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal; Barnsley Civic; Appetite, Stoke-on-Trent and RevoLuton, Marsh Farm.