YOU may never have thought about Andover even once in your life.

Next Tuesday and Wednesday however, the Hampshire town will be at the core of an irreverent play whose debut tour is being brought to the York Theatre Royal by the Up In Arms theatre company for its opening two performances.

“I think I’m Andover’s greatest poet by default,” says a not entirely serious Barney Norris, writer of Fear Of Music. “But of course the greatest piece of Andover-based art is Wild Thing – The Troggs were from there!

“It’s a place that’s not often written about, and I’m lifting the stone to see what’s going on underneath.”

Barney’s father moved to Andover in 2001 and Barney himself lived there in 2010-2011 while finishing a masters degree.

“The Government Chief Whip [Sir George Young] is the MP there and it has a Tory majority of 18,000, but it also has a lot of boarded-up shops and Sixties’ architecture from when the population grew from 5,000 to 50,000,” says Barney.

“We took the actors down there to have a look, because it was also important to show them that it’s not like Glasgow or the Buttershaw estate in Bradford that Andrea Dunbar wrote about.”

Barney draws upon his observation of living in modern-day Andover to inform his story of two brothers “stuck in a room” there in a 75-minute play that “time-bends” between 1988 and 1993.

Elder brother Luke was the first in his family to go to university, writes Barney; now he has returned home, determined to stop his irritating fireball of a brother from following in their father’s footsteps by joining the army.

“The play invites you to piece together a tragedy that sees history repeating itself, as two boys with starkly different futures, surrounded by mixtapes, guitars and ambitions, discover how easy it is to get lost in a country that doesn’t look after its own,” says Barney.

Why set it in the past, not now? “There were two thoughts behind that. The first was I wanted to write about the obsession I had with taping the Top 40 [hence the show’s poster image, pictured above] – but then it was pointed out to me that I’d be writing about someone a bit odd!” says Barney.

“Then the other thing was that Seamus Heaney once said he avoided writing the Troubles in Ireland at the time because it produced ‘Troubles Trash’, and now it’s even more difficult to make a statement about contemporary politics because it’s so instantly obsolete whereas everyone knows the symbolism of Margaret Thatcher’s era.”

Barney has re-written the show and changed its title from Missing since its four-week debut at the Tristan Bates Theatre last year.

“I was very lucky to have people like [playwrights] Caryl (CORRECT) Churchill and David Hare come and give notes on the play, because of the link Up In Arms have with Max Stafford-Clark’s Out Of Joint theatre company,” he says.

“Caryl thought it was too politically blunt…and David said he would have preferred it if the brothers had gone out into the world, but I still saw it as a miniature portrait of these two people who were stuck in a bedroom rather than finding an alternative.

“I went with what Caryl suggested, and because I’ve set it in the past, there’s a richer prism of meaning, where you can two say two things at once [about the past and indirectly the present]. That made me feel able to ease off with the politics.”

Up In Arms presents Fear Of Music, York Theatre Royal Studio, February 19 and 20, 7.45pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk