Laughter

'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.