I sometimes think producers should ban so-called “friends” on first nights. I say this because this rare revival of Peter Barnes’s weirdly fascinating play, first seen as part of a double-bill in 1969, was undermined by the hysterical cachinnations of a select few.
Of course, the play is funny; but it also offers a tragic vision of mankind.
Barnes, who died in 2004, is currently enjoying a bit of a comeback. Just as the recently revived The Ruling Class satirised class deference, so this play seems to be attacking religious zeal. Barnes introduces us to St Eusebius, who has spent 13 years living in an Egyptian cave on a diet of olives and water, fighting off the daily temptations of the devil. But Eusebius’s hermetic isolation is punctured when a rival saint, Pior, turns up claiming that this is his divinely designated patch. Clad in filthy loincloths and festooned with chains, the two men see each other as demons and engage in a turf war that is partly spiritual but ends up violently physical.
Barnes was always a dedicated anti-naturalist, who relished spicing serious issues with jokes, songs and dance, but in fact there now seems something a bit mechanical about his use of music-hall catchphrases and the sight of the warring saints doing a soft-shoe shuffle. At its best, and in a way that is easily translatable into modern terms, the play shows how religion is capable of inducing a proprietary fanaticism. Not only does Eusebius argue that “God’s house has many mansions but this one is occupied”, the two men also engage in a competitive masochism to see who can lay claim to the most suffering.
What makes the play intriguingly ambivalent, however, is Barnes’s perspective on a post-religious world. At one point Eusebius, transcending time and space, looks at life today and sees millions packed together and never alone with God. “’Tis,” he declares, “a vision of Hell.”
Fierce monasticism and blanket atheism, Barnes implies, are equally barren, and – even if it could move a bit more quickly – Mary Franklin’s production for Rough Haired Pointer expresses this duality within Barnes’s play. Christopher Hone’s design, dominated by a mound of sun-baked excrement, has the right desert feel and the performances are good.
Jordan Mallory-Skinner is all ragged asceticism as the self-torturing Eusebius and Jake Curran looks even leaner and hungrier as the penitential Pior. It makes for a strange evening but one that suggests that Barnes, like Beckett and Buñuel, was an atheist obsessed with religion.
- At the King’s Head until 2 August. Box office: 020-7478 0160.
