Optional Supplemental/Background Information
The following information gives some contextual information about the play including details about the playwright and the history of the story and the original production. It is intended for you to use as much or as little as interests you and is in no way required for you to be familiar with it in regards to our discussions.
PLAYWRIGHT: Peter Barnes
Peter Barnes was one of the most audacious, creative, exhilarating, visionary, envelope-pushing, joke-cracking, anti-establishment playwrights that the 20th-Century produced. He was probably its least-known most-important playwright, as well. As one academic put it, “Barnes is almost better known for his obscurity than for his plays,” which is a very Barnesian way of putting it. I’ve had the good fortune to direct two of his plays and would jump at the chance to do so again. He wrote plays that often required massive casts and extravagant design needs; both characteristics that few companies can afford. His language was dense, theatrical, and nonsensical. It is suspected that he is second only to Shakespeare in the creation of new words in his plays. He often wrote about history and the corruptive nature of power and those who hold it and was a champion of the underdog.
This passage by Bernard Dukore very accurately and succinctly lays out as clear a description of his work as I’ve ever read. “Thematically, Barnes’ plays are subversive of the political, economical, and religious Establishement. Stylistically, they are anti-naturalistic and neo-Jacobean, somewhat in the manner of Ben Jonson, who he admires this side of idolatry and whose works he has edited, adapted, and directed. Mordantly and hilariously satiric, Barnes’ plays blend a truculent vision of human beings in society with bold theatricality. They include outrageous gags, some with sources in burlesque and music hall, Joe Miller’s Joke Book and Ben Johnson’s Jest Book [sic], all side by side with literary allusions; references to popular culture, such as songs and movies, in tandem with archaic diction and words of his own invention; poetic passages interspersed with vulgar and sometimes obscene phrases; ritual mixed with slapstick. They employ methods associated with, and partly derived from, Brechtian epic theatre and Artaudian theatre of cruelty. Sprawling panoramas that turn on a sixpence (that is, switch styles instantaneously) and are deliberately grotesque, they eschew tidiness in both dramatic and theatrical style.”
Barnes grew up on the southern coast of England in a seaside resort town. His parents worked the boardwalks and amusement arcades, and Barnes grew up among the Punch and Judy shows and variety acts. He chose not to attend university, but was self-taught including taking a correspondence course in theology. When he was working on a play, he would write long-hand in the Reading Room of the British Museum. When he was writing for film or television, he would go to McDonald’s and write. He would order a hamburger, let it cool, and then, when he was ready to go, he would throw the bun away and take the patty home for his dog.
Reknowned theatre critic, Harold Hobson, stated of Barnes’ THE RULING CLASS in 1968, that it was the most exciting and important debut since Beckett with WAITING FOR GODOT, Osborne with LOOK BACK IN ANGER and Pinter with THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. THE RULING CLASS was quickly turned into a film which was nominated for the Palme d’OR and earned an Academy Award Nomination for Peter O’Toole for Best Actor for which he played the 14th Earl of Gurney who had delusions of being both Jesus Christ and Jack the Ripper.
Producing a play by Barnes was always a risk, but he often found an advocate in the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is ironic as Barnes was vocal in his dislike of Shakepeare as over-rated and a mechanism to promote tourism. The RSC, which produced six of his plays, is one of the few organizations with the resources to tackle his work and they aren’t always successful at it. Barnes maintained that the RSC had been in danger of losing its subsidy after producting his play THE BEWITCHED. In most cases, the company was only able to take the risk when they’d had a super-successful HAMLET and MUCH ADO in the previous season. With his disdain for Shakepspeare, it’s no small irony that Peter Barnes’ was the RSC’s most produced living playwright until his death in 2004.
When audiences have the rare chance to attend one of Barnes’ plays, they are never short-changed. "If there is any motto I have over my desk it is the one word MORE. I want more of everything. More of comedy, more of drama, more of tragedy, more of parody, more of music, more, more, more, more, not less, less, less,” Barnes once stated. One of my favorite quotes about Barnes came from a review of one of his plays: “Peter Barnes never wrote a 2-hour play when a 4-hour play would do just as well.”
The published version of Barnes’ plays is never exactly what you will see in a production. In the text, Barnes throws in all the jokes, all the angles by which one could view a scene or a moment in the play, all the descriptions he’s come up with for a character or location, with the full expectation that each production will edit the script to its own strengths and resources. This is why reading his plays can sometimes feel exhausting; it’s the textual equivalent of a 24-course meal. It’s very likely that he will write four different sentences stating the same thing in different ways. I encourage you to keep this in mind as you read the play.
While he tended to write large-scale epics, he was also very skilled at writing smaller, one-act plays as well. He has written numerous radio and television plays. His running series of monologues for radio, BARNES’ PEOPLE, attracted the likes of John Gielgud, Alec Guiness, Judi Dench, Peggy Ashcroft, Alan Rickman, Laurence Olivier, Simon Callow, Sean Connery, John Hurt, Donald Pleasance, Peter Ustinov, Alec McCowen, Joan Plowright, and Paul Scofield to name a few. A selection of four of these monologues was recorded and streamed by the Original Theatre Company during the pandemic. He wrote three one-act plays about people with disabilities for television called NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS.
He was extremely prolific and one of the most respected adaptors of classical plays for radio and theatre. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his adaptation of ENCHANTED APRIL in 1992. Towards the end of the 20th century he became sought after by American television to write a series of adaptations of classic family stories that included ALICE IN WONDERLAND, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, ARABIAN NIGHTS, NOAH’S ARK, and MERLIN.
He became a father for the first time at the age of 69, and again with the birth of triplets, at age 70. His last play (unproduced) was called BABIES and dealth with the challenges of being an elderly parent. He died when he was 72.
A REMEMBRANCE OF PETER BARNES
Peter Barnes remembered – by Simon Callow
When I saw The Ruling Class at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1968, I had no doubt whatever that I had witnessed the work of a genius, an authentic modern masterpiece. Pinter and Bond were the heroes of a slightly older generation than mine: they were already established and revered and had around them an aura of profundity; their very crypticness and unknowability put them in the running to be the heirs of Beckett, and though I made the conventional obeisances in their direction, I was secretly frustrated by their lack of communicativeness. The Ruling Class was what I had been craving for: eloquent, anarchic, theatrical, hilarious, exhilaratingly anti-Establishment.
It was designed to get up people’s noses – ten people walked out at the performance I saw – their seats thrillingly springing back ‘Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!’ – when Jack Gurney’s marriage vows commenced with the phrase ‘From the bottom of my heart to the tip of my penis’. But for me when Tuck the butler confessed to having peed in the thirteenth Earl’s soup every day for 40 years, when Jack came on for his wedding night on a tricycle singing Verdi, when the House of Lords was pushed on from either side of the wings bearing their lordships’ skeletons draped across the benches, the serried ranks of corpses covered in cobwebs, I felt that as long as writers of this vitality, passion and rage continued to write for the theatre, it would live forever. Indeed, I wrote to the author to tell him so, at the same time writing to his agent Peggy Ramsay to ask if I could stage the play at Queen’s University in Belfast where I was then studying. Peggy wrote back to say that there was such a thing as rep rights, dear, and when they had been taken up, perhaps I might be allowed… but two days later, another letter from her arrived, saying that the author had given his personal permission for me to do the play without conditions and never mind about the royalties.
I didn’t meet Barnes for some years, but when I did I realised that that was him all over: he didn’t care about the money, he didn’t even care whether the plays were done to the highest level of professional polish, he just wanted them done, wanted to be allowed to tell his hilarious ‘anecdotes of destiny’ (his admiration for Isak Dinesen, whose phrase that is, was absolute) – above all, to make ’em laugh. On the whole, he felt that Macbeth had got it more or less right: life was indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but somehow this fact – far from depressing him – gave him endless satisfaction. His own life was a perfect case in point: dozens of brilliant plays and adaptations piling up which no one who had any money would put on, though stars were queuing up to play the parts, plays crying out for the resources of the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose actors and audiences would have revelled in them; while television companies simply couldn’t pour enough money into his bank account for writing the screenplays he turned out before breakfast and the serious work of the day had begun. He actually tried putting up the money out of his own pocket for a production of Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie, one of his most delirious and outrageous inventions, but somehow they even managed to stop him from doing that.
In his domestic life he watched his beloved first wife Charlotte slip away mentally, and would sit stoically and practically as she succumbed to paranoid delusion, reasoning with her, supporting her, feeding her, all the while behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. ‘That’s life,’ he seemed to be feeling. Ben Jonson was his great hero, but it was the language, the energy, the invention that he loved, not Jonson’s dark and bitter heart. Peter had no judgement to offer on his fellow human beings: ‘We’re all in it together,’ was his view. ‘None of it makes any sense, let’s have a laugh.’ He winkled out laughter from the most unlikely places: Belsen, the court of Ivan the Terrible, the bubonic plague, horrors to which the only possible human response was a joke. He was astonished, and delighted, when American companies suddenly started performing his plague play Red Noses, Black Death because they construed it as a response to AIDS. His point had simply been that purity of heart and a good belly laugh can cure the world. ‘I jest, therefore I am’ are the words that should be inscribed on his tombstone. When he died, I sent flowers with the card: ‘Was it something I said?’ I like to think he saw the card from the great Reading Room in the sky, and let out one of his great banshee laughs.
This rare man leaves behind him a beautiful wife, four bonny babies, and a legacy of plays produced and unproduced – including his stupendous adaptations of the other Great Unperformed of dramatic literature – which could keep a theatre company going for half a century without once repeating itself. His voice is to be heard in all of them, loud, profane and clear; how we need that voice as the coalition of the correct goes about its business of extinguishing all traces of the great medieval carnival world that Peter never ceased to celebrate. Now he’s swapping jokes with Rabelais, Chaucer, Marie Lloyd and Max Miller. Lucky them, poor us.
RED NOSES
RED NOSES was written in 1977 under the original title RED NOSES, BLACK DEATH. Peter Barnes shopped the play around for eight years until the Royal Shakespeare Company agreed to pick it up and produce it. The play opened at the Barbican Theatre on July 2, 1985 starring Anthony Sher as Father Flote. It won the Olivier Award for Best New Play. While the play is popular with University theaters, it has yet to have a professional production in the United States.
The play is set in France during the Black Death and follows a priest who believes he has been called by God to ease the suffering of the masses. Barnes was rigorous in his study of the period and the world he presents (if not the characters and story) is historically accurate.
THE BLACK DEATH: History
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Afro-Eurasia from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causing the death of 75–200 million people. The plague created religious, social and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.
The origin of the Black Death is disputed. The pandemic’s first definitive appearance was in Crimea in 1347. It was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on slave ships, spreading through the Mediterranean Basin. There is evidence that once it came ashore, the Black Death was in large part spread by fleas and the person-to-person contact via aerosols, thus explaining the very fast inland spread of the epidemic.
The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30 percent to 60 percent of the European population.[ The plague might have reduced the world population from c. 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century.
CAUSES: The most authoritative contemporary theory of a cause is found in a report from the medical faculty in Paris. It blamed the heavens, in the form of a conjunction of three planets in 1345 that caused a "great pestilence in the air". Muslim religious scholars taught that the pandemic was a “martyrdom and mercy” from God, assuring the believer's place in paradise. For non-believers, it was a punishment. Some Muslim doctors cautioned against trying to prevent or treat a disease sent by God.
SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS: Symptoms of the disease include fever of 100–106 °F, headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80 percent die within eight days.
Contemporary accounts of the pandemic are varied and often imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes in the groin, neck, and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened. Boccaccio's description:
In men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg ... From the two said parts of the body this deadly buboe soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. As the buboe had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves.
This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most victims died two to seven days after initial infection. Freckle-like spots and rashes, which could have been caused by flea-bites, were identified as another potential sign of plague.
DEATHS: The plague killed some 75 to 200 million people. It is likely that over four years, 45–50% of the European population died of plague. In 1348, the disease spread so rapidly that before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a third of the European population had already perished. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die. Half of Paris' population of 100,000 people died. Monks, nuns, and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death. The overwhelming number of deceased bodies produced by the Black Death caused the necessity of mass burial sites in Europe, sometimes including up to several hundred or several thousand skeletons.
Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura recorded his experience from Siena, where plague arrived in May 1348:
Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices ... great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night ... And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug ... And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.
PERSECUTIONS: Rnewed religious fervour and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims, and lepers, blaming them for the crisis. Lepers, and others with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were killed throughout Europe.
Because 14th-century healers and governments were at a loss to explain or stop the disease, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for outbreaks. Many believed the epidemic was a punishment by God for their sins, and could be relieved by winning God's forgiveness.
SOCIAL: One theory that has been advanced is that the devastation resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th-century Italy and led to the Renaissance. Italy was particularly badly hit by the pandemic, and it has been speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art. As a result of the drastic reduction in the populace the value of the working class increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer the increased need for labour, workers travelled in search of the most favorable position economically.
Prior to the emergence of the Black Death, the workings of Europe were run by the Catholic Church and the continent was considered a feudalistic society, composed of fiefs and city-states. The pandemic completely restructured both religion and political forces; survivors began to turn to other forms of spirituality and the power dynamics of the fiefs and city-states crumbled.
FRANCE: The Kingdom of France had the largest population of Europe at the time, and the Black Death was a major catastrophe. At the time, Pope Clement VI resided in Avignon in present-day France during the Western Schism, and issued his condemnations of the Jewish persecutions during the Black Death as well as the flagellants.
(This section was condensed and edited from Wikipedia.)
The below video is a pretty good overview of the Black Death. Much of the information is reflected in RED NOSES. This was by far the least salacious (which is saying something) of the many videos on the Black Death (it’s narrated by Leonard Nimoy for God’s sake).
THE BLACK DEATH: Imagery
The following pieces are contemporary renditions of the world of the Black Death.
