Plays International, Daily Telegraph, QX, etc
Peter Barnes is, I am certain, one of the major playwrights this country has produced in the second half of the twentieth century, equal in importance to Pinter, Stoppard, Bond and early John Arden. If he appears less ofthe in the schedules of our national theatres, that is due to the seep and complexity of his major plays (like The Bewitched, or Red Noses) which led timid directors to cut them so drastically that their structure and daring conception was subverted and obscured. These masterpieces still await worthy productions.
Now Peter Barnes' latest work has reached London via Manchester. Dreaming is less complex, shorter, but characteristically vintage Barnes, a strange mixture of poetry, black humour, satire and traicomedy, with those sudden transitions from pathos to music-hall song and dance that are a Barnes speciality. It is set in the period of the War of the Roses, the Yorkists under the Duke of Gloucester, Richard-III-to-be, have won the Battle of Tewkesbury, and - wrongly - believe that peace has come. One of the soldiers, Captain Mallory is now dreaming of at last going home to his wife and child whom he left behind years ago. When he gets to his village he finds that both are dead. He rejoins the group of his camp-followers that formed a sort of substitute family for him during the wars: Bess, a feisty Mother-Courage-type victualler, the money-mad Davy and Skelton, a gaunt melancholic who yearns for death but never can find it.
In a crazed victim of war's brutality, Mallory thinks he recognises a reincarnation of his dead wife and marries her. The group is joined by a disillusioned priest and the play shows their odyssey towards a new dreamed-of home through a landscape of post-war desolation and brutality to the inevitable end and for all time...
The play opend in Manchester before the start of the Kosovo war; yet Barnes has prophetically created a most topical parallel to the thousands of refugees who are now dreaming of getting home in just such a landscape of desolation.
Alan Miller Bunford has designed a brilliantly original setting. A circular mirror hung at an oblique angle above the stage reflects the characters - so that we can see them before us and at the same time from their rear and also from above. It is an arrangement which demands sheer virtuosity from the lighting designer Douglas Kuhrt. Peter Barnes himself directs a performance which flows smoothly from scene to scene on what is essentially a bare stage, het through the mirror effect and the ever changing lighting, present a sequence of dazzlingly colourful and gripping images.
Acting such a text which veers from tragedy to comedy to parody and music-hall is not easy - the large cast, however, fully masters the problem. Gerald Murphy show Mallory moving from brutal killer to soul yearning for redemption, iwth tact and subtle melancholy. Dilys Laye as Bess is outstandingly sardonic and worldly-wise (she is also responsible for the choreography); Paul Jesson brings out the humourous cynicism of the defrocked priest who becomes her lover (another stroke of Mother Courage...); Luke Williams has a most effective cameo-scene as Christ who descends from the cross to complain about his father; and Christopher Ettridge make ths most - as the Duke of Gloucester - of parodying the tomes of Olivier and McKellan.
This may not be major Barnes, het it is essentially characteristic Peter Barnes. It should draw fresh attention to the work of one of the great playwrights of our time.
At the start of Peter Barnes's remarkable play, the stage is dominated by an
image of a vast skull clenching the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York
between its fearsome grinning teeth.
It looks just like the logo of that greatest of all pyschedelic rock bands, the Grateful
Dead, and for the first few minutes, theatregoers may indeed believe that they are in the
grip of some terrifying LSD flashback.
For this appears to be the kind of play that was supposed to have gone out of fashin
on the day Margaret Thatacher came to power - a sprawling socio-political historical epic
in deep debt to Brecht. Think Howard Barker. Think Edward Bond. Be
scared. Be very scared.
We begin in the apocalyptic wasteland of the battle of Tewkesbury during the Wars of the
Roses. Cannons fire, smoke rolls across the stage and scavengers plunder bodies for
loot.
A mercenary killer called Mallory comes on. Like ET, he mournefully declares that he wants
to go home. So he and a raggle-taggle band make a journey across England and into
Wales in which violent death and suffering lie around every corner.
Sounds ghastly, doesn't it? And findning such a play in Shaftesbury Avenue seems as likely
as discovering mermaids frolicking in the fountains of Trafalgar Square.
Yet this proves to be a strangely beguiling evening that constantly confounds one's
expectations. Peter Barnes, best known for The Ruling Class and Red
Noses, may now be the playwright that time forgot, but he is blessed with remarkable
dramatic vision and a terrific sense of humour.
You expect an evening of unrelieved gloom, but laughter keeps breaking out amid the
carnage. People make hilarious speeches just before their throats are cut.
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, comes on and complains of the terrible difficulty he always
has in finding a horse. In the middle of a wedding service, Jesus climbs down from a
crucifix and launches into a stream of Jewish jokes.
There are song-and-dance routines straight out of the music hall.
It doesn't all work. With so large a cast, not all the characters come into clear
definition. Some of the gags make you cringe.
But there is real originality here, as though all those awful B's - Brecht, Bond, Barker -
had suddenly started writing scripts for Monty Python. Better still, beyond Barnes's
bracing mixture of laughter and brutality lies a poetic sense of the transcendent.
As Mallory searches for a home, as his Mother Courage-like sidekick, Bess, searches for
heart's ease, as the mercenary young lad Davy sacrifices his life to save another, you
become movingly aware of the survival of love amid terror.
There are also some beautiful speeches in which the recently dead communicate from
beyond the grave - a sense of comfort and companionship in the darkness of mortality.
Barnes directs his own sprawling, admirably ambitious play, which is memorably designed by
Alan Miller Bunford with a vast, tilted mirro that reflects both the actors on stage and
the mutilated corpses that lie beneath their feet.
Gerald Murphy, an acot who combines the heroic and the hammy, plays Mallory with both
menance and anguished yearning.
Among the large supporting cast I especially liked Christopher Ettridge as a hilariously
camp and cadaverous Richard, and James Clyde as the terminally gloomy Skelton, a character
who is desperate to die but can never quite manage it.
Quite what such a bizarre defiantly uncommercial show is doing in the West End I can't
imagine, but if Dreaming is an act of commercial folly, one can't help but salute
its daring.
THE FOLLOWING GREAT REVIEWS TO BE ADDED SOON:
THE FOLLOWING LESS-THAN-FAVOURABLE REVIEWS TO BE ADDED EVEN LATER: