Peter Barnes, an inventive and challenging dramatist, combines a hatred of the class system with a savage, satirical, and wildly comic style. Born in the East End of London to working-class parents, Barnes was the older of two children. His parents moved to Clacton-on-Sea, a resort area where they operated an amusement park and where Barnes was educated. After leaving school at seventeen, he worked for the Greater London Council before serving in the Royal Air Force from 1949 to 1950.

Upon his return to civilian life, Barnes wrote film reviews for the Greater London Council, resigning in the early 1950’s to become a freelance film critic. In 1956, he joined Warwick Films as a story editor, where he was responsible for selecting material for possible filming by the studio. From 1959 to 1966, Barnes wrote seven screenplays, including The White Trap and Not with My Wife You Don’t, and a television script, The Man with a Feather in His Hat. Feeling constrained by the commercial parameters and desiring to express his own ideas freely, Barnes turned to the stage.

The Ruling Class: A Baroque Comedy, brought Barnes to international prominence. In the work, Barnes aimed for a “comic theater of contrasting moods and opposites, where everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous,” and he satirizes the values, viciousness, perversions, and manipulations of the British ruling class. Barnes’s view of society becomes even bleaker in Leonardo’s Last Supper, where the famous artist is brought to a charnel house after having been prematurely declared dead. In the midst of his joy over his second chance to continue his creativity, he is killed by the poor family who needs the burial money. In the companion piece, Noonday Demons, two fourth century hermits argue about which of them is the one to whom God speaks until one kills the other. Using language that combines archaisms and contemporary slang, Barnes underscores the parallels with contemporary debates about capitalism, religion, and self-interest. The style is comic and vituperative in the manner of Ben Jonson.

Although Barnes left school at seventeen, he has been and is an enthusiastic and disciplined self-educator. As a result, he is not only an unusually literate dramatist but also a prolific adapter of works by dramatists whom he particularly admires. In 1970, he combined two of Frank Wedekind’s plays into Lulu. He is particularly drawn to Jonson’s avaricious characters and abundant vulgarity of language and situation, qualities that are readily apparent in Barnes’s own work.

In The Bewitched, Barnes continues his preoccupation with the power of a ruling class, the profit motive, and murder in the name of God. It is a huge play with more than thirty scenes and forty characters. Laughter! provoked even more commentary, as Barnes explores in graphic theatrical terms further links between insanity, political power, and comedy. Red Noses, set during the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, continues Barnes’s preoccupation with comedy and social upheaval. The Red Noses are a religious group of entertainers who try to divert the populace; in the process, they discover the revolutionary possibilities of the stage in combating the oppressive forces of the church and state. With the end of the plague, repression is reestablished and Barnes’s hope that “laughter linked with revolution might be the best of both worlds” is not yet achieved.

Because producers were often reluctant to stage his plays because of their controversial nature, Barnes became involved in writing for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Barnes’ People I, Barnes’ People II, and Barnes’ People III are collections...