An excitingly talented British playwright, Peter Barnes, 40, has appeared on the transatlantic scene. His first play, The Ruling Class, is having its U.S. premiere in the handsome 500-seat Kreeger Theater that is making its own debut as part of Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage. Encountering Barnes is somewhat like fencing in a Noel Coward drawing room while seething with the stomach-pit anger of the early John Osborne, and then leaving the room for a short session in the late Joe Orton's black-comic vomitorium. What remains as the distinguishing mark of Barnes himself? An exuberantly antic disposition, for one thing, plus schoolboy zest and schoolboy humor—which, in the British, seem to last for a lifetime. Perhaps a more significant trait is that he is a painter's playwright, a man with a gift for bringing images to vivid life on the stage.
Consider the prologue. After a hard gray day dispensing law from the bench, the 13th Earl of Gurney likes to indulge in a kinky pick-me-up. He has his valet bring him a step stool and orders him to slip a silk hangman's noose over a beam of his stately home. The valet departs. The earl strips down to his long underwear, dons a tricornered cocked hat, buckles on a sword, and struggles into a white ballet tutu. He mounts the stool, puts his head in the noose, and steps off. He twitches there, gasping hoarsely, neck muscles bulging red.
It is not the end. With a desperate little back jump, his feet regain the stool. The earl's face is bleary with ecstasy. He speaks in a kind of Nirvana rasp, and we get the full inebriant impact of Barnes' imagistic powers: "Touched him, saw her, towers of death and silence, angels of fire and ice. Saw Alexander covered with honey and beeswax in his tomb and felt the flowers growing over me. A man must have his visions. How else could an English judge and peer of the realm take moonlight trips to Marrakesh and Ponders End? See six vestal virgins smoking cigars? Moses in bedroom slippers? Naked bosoms floating past Formosa? Desperate diseases need desperate remedies. Just time for a quick one. [Puts his head back in the noose.] Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man. There's plenty of time to win this game, and thrash the Spaniards too. [Draws his sword.] Form squares, men! Smash the Mahdi, and Binnie Barnes!"
With a lustful gurgle, he steps off —and inadvertently knocks over the step stool. This time, it is the end for the 13th Earl of Gurney. Mind you, this has occurred in less than five minutes after the curtain has gone up, a sure sign of the revved-up authority of a born playwright. Understandably, Barnes cannot maintain this pace for the rest of the evening, but unlike many new playwrights, he does not suffer from plot anemia. It is impossible to retrace all of the narrative twists and turns, and unsuitable to bare the many surprises of a play that is almost surely destined for wide regional theater performance and, inevitably, a future New York showing.
Ruler of the Universe. In barest outline, the play proper concerns itself with two themes. One is a lambasting of the British upper class. This is fast, funny, furious and unrelenting, but it is scarcely fresh, since Osborne began doing it 15 years ago in Look Back in Anger.