BARNES SPEAKS 

I should've remembered the advice: don't write anything you can phone, don't phone anything you can talk, don't talk anything you can whisper, don't whisper anything you can smile, don't smile anything you can nod, don't nod anything you can wink. It would have been a lot easier winking my way through life...

Obsessive artistic striving conforms to the textbook definition of madness: 'an internally consistent but fundamentally mistaken understanding of the nature of the external world and a determination to preserve this vision at all costs despite its evident harmfulness.' At a guess, that definition fits most artists and all politicians, those stunned mullets who think they are born to rule us...

Men and women always act out of character, those in drama rarely, which is why they are never 'real' and shouldn't aim to be...

Audiences

When an audience weeps or laughs in the theatre, it feels it has done something virtuous merely by identifying with and experiencing the actions on stage. Noble feelings become a cheap substitute for noble actions. But real victims demand real attention. And that's a different story. Nobody's interested. The theatre's become an easy way out for everybody.

So what was I trying to do in these plays?

I wanted to write a roller-coaster drama of hairpin bends; a drama of expertise and ecstacy balanced on a tight-rope between the comic and tragic with a multi-faceted fly-like vision where every line was dramatic and every scene a play in itself; a drama with a language so exact it could describe what the flame of a candle looked like after the candle had been blown out and so high-powered it could fuse telephone wires and have a diret impact on reality; a drama that made the surreal real, that went to the limit, then furthur, with no dead time, but with the speed of a seismograph recording an earthquake; a drama of 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' where a Lion, a Tinman and a Scarecrow are alwas looking for a girl with ruby slippers; a drama glorifying differences, condemning hierarchies, that would rouse the dead to fight, always in the forefront of the struggle for the happiness of manknd; an anti-bos drama for the shorn not the shearers...

The theatre is a thermometer of life but our theatre is a theatre without size or daring; a theatre without communion. It contains no miracles. The bread is never changed into flesh or the wine into blood. It is a theatre of carpet-slippers...

To strike out, to launch repeated bayonet attacks on naturalism, to write rigorously against the prevailing mode, requires courage....

A writer who does not write corrupts the soul. Besides, it is aburd to sit around sniffig wild flowers when you can invent them, and new worlds.

Extracts from PLAYS: 1, Introduction; Methuen Drama (Publisher)

On laughter--the case against laughter

'There is a strong argument that laughter, far from aleviating, only increases the suffering, in the sense that if we laugh, then we don't change the miseries and the injustices. Hatred is sometimes more remedial in alleviating injustice than a sense of humour. It's too easy for comedians and satirists to say, "I',m making fun of it, therefore I'm doing some good because I'm helping to change it."'....

Laughter 'softens our hatred. An excuse to change nothing, for nothing needs changing when it's all a joke...Laughter's too feeble a weapon against te barbarities of life. A blam for battles lost, standard equipment for the losing side; the powerful have no need for it.'...

On laughter--the case for laughter

'I believe the only thing in the theatre that has a ring of truth is comedy.'

'Great comedy isn't helping to make the serious stuff easy to swallow. The comedy is the serious stuff'...

'A work isn't great despite the comedy. It's great because of the comedy. The insight, weight and morality are in the laugher: they cannot be separated from it.'...

Copyright Technofilm 1997