Peter Barnes

First produced by the RSC at the Barbican in 1985, Barnes' 1978 'Red Noses' is a black comedy about the Black Death, a vibrant and slapstick hymn to the power of laughter and the human spirit. A dying man has an epiphany that he must serve God by spreading laughter, and, joined by another man who communicates by shaking limbs covered in tiny bells, he forms a pious brotherhood of joy, the Red Noses of Auxerre, to give cheer to a pestilent and doomed world.

'The Bewitched', first performed at London's Aldwych Theatre in 1974, tells the story of Spain's ill-fated King Carlos II. In the 17th century, Spain's political stability hinged on the continuation of the sovereign bloodline. Unfortunately Carlos, the son conceived by the elderly King Philip IV in the opening scene, has epilepsy, distorted limbs, impaired speech and mental confusion, the tragic result of centuries of royal inbreeding. The play traces the grim attempts of his court to engineer the conception of an heir.

In 'Leonardo's Last Supper', Peter Barnes explores a theatrical mode in which everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous. A family of undertakers in a mediaeval charnel house prepares to bury Leonardo da Vinci; disposing of the Renaissance genius will be a lucrative coup for the family business, and so the atmosphere is jovial as they dress up as plague doctors and bicker around the corpse. But their dreams of prosperity and perfumed gloves are interrupted when the health of the deceased polymath suddenly improves. 'Leonardo's Last Supper' was first presented with 'Noonday Demons' in 1969 at the Open Space Theatre.

A novel based on the life of the author's great-grandmother follows the story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, through the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

St Eusebius is in devotional exile in the desert, alone apart from a tower of his own excrement, enduring extreme physical deprivation for the betterment of his soul and apologising to the maggots that live in his festering flesh. After a desperate struggle with a Cockney demon that speaks through Eusebius's mouth, he is challenged by St Pior, a rival hermit, to a bizarre duel of piety. With a mixture of slapstick, rhetoric, religious fervour and red-blooded vernacular, Barnes creates a comic theatre of opposites. 'Noonday Demons' was premiered with 'Leonardo's Last Supper' in 1969 at the Open Space Theatre.

'Revolutionary Witness', televised by the BBC in 1989, is a series of four direct and intelligent monologues about the French Revolution, excavating the individual voices from the historical tide, each based on the story of a real survivor of the Revolution. In 'The Patriot' a man sells souvenirs: bones, stones and medals made from drawbridge chains are flogged as mementos of the uprising, and holy symbols of the new world order. 'The Butcher' is a man who has found it hard to understand very much, except that the Revolution was right and moral and its casualties deserve a hero's pension. 'The Preacher' has an uncompromising commitment to the revolution. 'The Amazon' is the complaint of a courtesan who led the mob wearing red silk on a black horse, and now sits mouldering in an asylum, recalling her life with unhinged lyricism.

DATE WITH AN ANGEL Luisa was drawn to Zachary West. It was more than a nurse's compassion for her patient that moved her, it was the man himself: temperamental, courageous and so very desirable. When she discovered it was her father's car that had caused Zachary's accident, she was draw even further into his life. For Zachary, healing --- both physically and emotionally --- would take time. And Luisa wanted to be there with him. But did he want her? She was fighting a rival she could neither see nor understand, a woman who haunted Zachary's dreams. A woman he could not forget ...

'Laughter!', first performed in 1978 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, is a two act play that dramatises the screaming cruelty of Ivan the Terrible - the 16th century Russian Tsar - and the anaesthetized bureaucracy which administrated the Nazi concentration camps in the 20th century. With his daring treatment of concentration camps, involving a music-hall style routine, Peter Barnes probes the cavity between comedy and tragedy, examining the mechanisms - among them laughter - which dampen atrocity.

'Bye bye Columbus', a television play first broadcast by the BBC in 1992, is a wry and mocking portrait of a man who sailed halfway across the world for a hint of gold. Peter Barnes mockingly dramatises the distinctly unheroic expedition of Christopher Columbus, which changed the face of the globe, though not entirely in the way he was expecting.

'The Ruling Class', premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968, is a witty, double-edged and idiosyncratic satire. After the 13th Earl of Gurney's morbid nightly indulgence turns into an accidental suicide, the title and estate passes to his son Jack, who has until hitherto been living in a psychiatric institution. He brings with him a belief in divine love, a penchant for sleeping upright on a cross and the conviction that he is the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.