by Peter Barnes
Film credits include: Dad’s Army, Testament of Youth, Pride, Blue Jasmine, Philomena, Sunshine on Leith, Kill Your Darlings, Tamara Drewe, Nowhere Boy, The Damned United, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, Infamous, Dirty Pretty Things, The War Zone, Elizabeth.
Richard Fitch | Associate Director
Training: Young Vic and the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
Directing credits include: 24 Hour Plays (Old Vic); A Kid Like Jake (The TS Eliot US/UK Exchange, Old Vic Theatre); Land’s End (Birmingham REP); Young Writers Programme Showcase (Lyric Hammersmith); Buro Four Event (Old Vic); Pangaea (workshop with Vicky Graham Productions); Last Man on the Heygate (Lyric Hammersmith); The Hour of Feeling (HighTide Festival with Public Theater, New York); The Welsh Atlantis (Latitude Festival) and The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane (Riverside Studios and Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore). He has directed workshops at Birmingham REP, the Old Vic, HighTide and IdeasTap.
Assistant and associate directing credits include: Assassins (Menier Chocolate Factory); Richard III (Trafalgar Transformed); Urinetown (St James Theatre and Apollo Theatre); Jack and the Beanstalk (Lyric Hammersmith and Watford Palace Theatre); 24 Hour Plays Celebrity Gala and 24 Hour Musicals Celebrity Gala (Old Vic); Island (National Theatre and UK tour); Bottleneck (Edinburgh); Clockwork (HighTide Festival Theatre); Four Nights in Knaresborough (Southwark Playhouse); The Marriage of Figaro (Watermill Theatre); Lakeboat and Prairie du Chien (Arcola Theatre); The Machine Gunners (Polka Theatre); Double Falsehood (Union Theatre and New Players Theatre); The Captive (Finborough Theatre) and The Great British Country Fete (Bush Theatre and national tour). Workshops include The Changeling, After Miss Julie (Young Vic); Island and Jacob’s Death (NT Studio).
He is former Resident Assistant Director of HighTide Festival Theatre and the recipient of the Sir Paul McCartney Human Spirit Award.
Rachel Wingate | Associate Designer
Design credits include: Manuelita (Popelei Theatre, Bolivar Hall and Richmix, London, Belly Dancer, Edinburgh); In Doggerland (Box of Tricks, national tour); Invertigo Takeover at Hightide Festival, Word:Play NWxSW (Box of Tricks, regional tour); Knowledge of Angels (Popelei Theatre, St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch); My Arms (24/7 Festival, Re:Play Festival and northern tour); Freefall (Invertigo Theatre, Guildhall Music Hall); Forrest Sale (Deloitte Ignite at ROH); Flaming Bodies, Riders to the Sea, The Bear, Savitri, The Waiter’s Revenge, Hin und Zuruck, Ballet Russes (Rosemary Branch); L’Enfant et Les Sortileges (Sherman Theatre); After the Dance (Caird Studio).
As Associate Designer: Bull (Young Vic); Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Talawa and National Theatre, national tour); Mogadishu (Royal Exchange and Lyric Hammersmith, national tour); Aladdin (Lyric Hammersmith); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Headlong, national tour).
Rachel has also worked as a design assistant for various designers for venues including the National, Royal Court, Royal Exchange and in the West End.
Christopher Cahill | Associate Costume Designer and Costume Supervisor
Theatre credits include: as Costume Supervisor, Urinetown (St James and Apollo Theatres); Morning to Midnight, Hotel, The Effect (National Theatre); Warhorse Proms (Royal Albert Hall); Wildfire, Tiger Country (Hampstead Theatre); Candide, As You Like It, King John, Tender Thing, Macbeth, Macbett, American Trade (RSC); The Bee (Soho Theatre); Three Days of Rain (Apollo Theatre); Salome (national tour); Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester). I’ll be the Devil, Tynan, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes (RSC).
Lizzie Frankl | Props Supervisor
Training: Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
As Props Supervisor credits include: Blithe Spirit (Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles); Ideal Husband (Chichester Festival Theatre); The River (Circle in the Square, Broadway); Speed the Plow (Playhouse Theatre); Electra, Much Ado About Nothing, Sweet Bird of Youth and Hedda Gabler (Old Vic Theatre); Barnum the Musical (UK tour); Amadeus (Chichester Festival Theatre); Monty Python Live (O2 Arena); Benvenuto Cellini, The Pilgim’s Progress and Eugene Onegin (English National Opera); Things We Do for Love (UK tour); Blithe Spirit (Gielgud Theatre); Urinetown (Apollo Theatre/St James Theatre); Singin’ in the Rain (UK tour); Mojo (Harold Pinter Theatre); Jeeves and Wooster (UK tour/Duke of York’s Theatre); Barking in Essex (Wyndhams Theatre); Scenes from a Marriage (St James Theatre); Little Hotel on the Side (Theatre Royal Bath); Eugene Onegin (Metropolitan Opera House); Testament of Mary (Walter Kerr Theatre, Broadway/Barbican Theatre) Derren Brown, Infamous (UK tour); Ghost the Musical (UK tour/Seoul, South Korea); Priscilla Queen of the Desert (UK tour); Dear World (Charing Cross Theatre); The Little Mermaid (Tokyo/Moscow/Netherlands); Blue Orange (UK tour); Timon of Athens (National Theatre); Steel Magnolias (UK tour) The Death of Klinghoffer, Legally Blonde (UK tour).
Upcoming shows include: Bodyguard the Musical (UK tour); High Society (Old Vic Theatre).
Before this Lizzie worked as Props Assistant for three years on various West End, regional and international productions.
Dominic Fraser | Production Manager
For Trafalgar Transformed: East is East, Richard III, The Pride, The Hothouse and Macbeth.
Production Manager of the Old Vic Theatre Company since 2004, Dominic has been responsible for all forty-five of the company’s productions under the artistic directorship of Kevin Spacey. For the 2008/2009 season, he took on the task of converting the Old Vic from its traditional proscenium configuration into an in-the-round space, which opened with The Norman Conquests in September 2008. As part of his work at the Old Vic, Dominic was Production Manager for the Bridge Project, a three-year collaboration with Brooklyn Academy of Music and Neal Street Productions, which has taken five plays to New York, London and twenty-two international venues. He was previously Technical Director at the Donmar Warehouse, taking it from its reopening after major refurbishment in 1992 through ten years under the artistic directorship of Sam Mendes and two under Michael Grandage. In this time, Dominic production-managed over 80 productions including major auditorium reconfigurations for Cabaret and The Threepenny Opera.
Introduction
The most exciting thing that can happen to a dramatic critic is when he is suddenly and unexpectedly faced with the explosive blaze of an entirely new talent of a very high order. This happens very rarely. In twenty years of reviewing plays it has happened to me, for example, only four times. The first was the original production at the Arts Theatre in 1955 of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The second, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court a year later. The third was Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1958; and the fourth Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class at the Nottingham Playhouse, directed by Stuart Burge, in the autumn of 1968.
The peculiar impact of such an experience is that one is taken completely by surprise. To see John Gielgud in The Importance of Being Earnest, or Laurence Olivier in Macbeth, his finest Shakespeare creation, is a memorable experience. In a certain sense, too, it holds the unexpected, but not altogether the unforeseen. Before one sees it one cannot tell what particular aspect of humanity Olivier will derive from his performance of Macbeth. Until he had played Macbeth one did not know that he would heartrendingly present a man who had so ordered his life that when he came to the end of it he had no friends, and no man who owed loyalty to him. But one did know beforehand that in all probability the performance would be fine and moving, even revelatory. One knew this for the simple reason that one had seen Olivier on many other occasions, and had come to recognise in him the possession of transcendent abilities.
That amazing evening at Nottingham, towards the close of 1968, however, to its other joys and triumphs added those of astonishment and discovery. Before the curtain rose on The Ruling Class no one appeared to have heard of its author, Peter Barnes. Nobody in the theatre appeared to know whether he had been to university, had written any other plays, was a stripling in his last year at school, or an old gentleman of ninety. It was hazarded to me that Mr Barnes was not a member of the aristocracy, but th
is was only a deduction from the fact that The Ruling Class is hostile to the nobility. As such, the deduction might easily have been wrong. For the production, if not the play, has firm connections with the upper classes that it derides. One of its most charmingly unintelligent characters, Dinsdale, the thirteenth Earl of Gurney’s nephew, has been played by two extremely bright young aristocrats, first, by Peter Eyre, whose grandfather was Lord Acton, and later, when Mr Eyre had contractual obligations elsewhere, by Jonathan Cecil, the grandson of the Marquis of Salisbury. Mr Barnes, however, is not himself an offshoot of Debrett, though privately he is very good-humoured about those who are. He has, I later found out, written other plays, and is an assiduous worker in that forcing house of revolution, the Reading Room of the British Museum. Even this information does not amount to very much. But it is more than I could discover on the opening night of The Ruling Class.
At that performance the play struck me like a revelation. Prudently I had expected nothing, and overwhelmingly I was given all: wit, pathos, exciting melodrama, brilliant satire, double-edged philosophy, horror, cynicism and sentiment, all combined in a perfect unity in the theatrical world of Mr Barnes’s extraordinary and idiosyncratic creation. Baudelaire, in discussing a nineteenth-century actor, says that the primary condition of a work of art, without which it cannot exist, is energy or life. The Ruling Class throbs with life and energy all through. Whatever else it is, it is not dead. From the unfortunate hanging of the twelfth Earl, through the crucifixion of the thirteenth, the disputable miracle and the battle of rival gods, the episode of Jack the Ripper and the striptease of Marguerite Gautier, it flashes all along with life. Paradoxically, the culminating scene in the House of Lords, with their Lordships cobwebbed, somnolent, and seemingly on the point of dissolution, is almost the most alive of all.
At a time when a great deal of theatrical energy is concentrated on forcing plays which no one wants to see on the sort of audiences that do not want to see any play at all it came as an immense delight to discover a drama which was not only thoughtful, but also exciting and amusing. For many years now incident and plot have been driven out of our theatre; Mr Barnes brings them back with both gusto and skill. The coup de théâtre by which the Lady of the Camelias is brought on to the stage, prompt on cue, is in itself a little marvel of stagecraft. It gives the kind of pleasure we have not had in the theatre for more than a decade. The moment one heard the thirteenth Earl’s reply to the question what made him think that he was God, one knew that a new wit had been born in the theatre; and all through the play one has the delightful thrill, which one felt had gone from the theatre for ever, of actually feeling that one wants to know what is going to happen next.
The Ruling Class, then, is immensely entertaining, but it is admirably philosophic, too. It mounts a lively and vigorous attack not only on the upper echelons of society, but also on all of us who rate cruelty higher than compassion, and consider violence more sane than peace. It brings us into contact with a mind of poise and depth and power; it combines rumbustiousness with delicacy, and in doing so is likely to prove a turning point in the drama of the second half of the twentieth century.
Harold Hobson, 1969
The Ruling Class was first presented at Nottingham Playhouse on 6 November 1968 and was subsequently transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on 26 February 1969. The play was presented by Gene Persson and Richard Pilbrow with the following cast:
13th Earl of Gurney
Peter Whitbread
Toastmaster
Robert Robertson
Daniel Tucker
Dudley Jones
Bishop Lampton
Ronald Magill
Sir Charles Gurney
David Dodimead
Dinsdale Gurney
Jonathan Cecil
Lady Claire Gurney
Irene Hamilton
Matthew Peake
Brown Derby
14th Earl of Gurney
Derek Godfrey
Dr Paul Herder
David Neal
Mrs Treadwell
Ann Heffernan
Mrs Piggot-Jones
Elizabeth Tyrrell
Grace Shelley
Vivienne Martin
McKyle
Ken Hutchison
McKyle’s Assistant
Terence Ratcliffe
Kelso Truscott, Q.C.
Laurence Harrington
Girl
Vicky Clayton
Det Inspector Brockett
Peter Whitbread
Det Sergeant Fraser
Robert Robertson
First Lord
C. Denier Warren
Second Lord
Brown Derby
Third Lord
Timothy Welsh
Director
Stuart Burge
Designer
John Napier
Lighting
Robert Ornbo
The Ruling Class
For Leela, Abby, Nathan and Zach
Characters
13th Earl of Gurney
Toastmaster
Daniel Tucker
Bishop Lampton
Sir Charles Gurney
Dinsdale Gurney
Lady Claire Gurney
Matthew Peake
14th Earl of Gurney
Dr Paul Herder
Mrs Treadwell
Mrs Piggot-Jones
Grace Shelley
McKyle
McKyle’s Assistant
Kelso Truscott, Q.C.
Girl (La Dama aux Camelias)
Detective Inspector Brockett
Detective Sergeant Fraser
First Lord
Second Lord
Third Lord
Prologue
Three distinct raps. Curtain rises. Spot downstage centre. The 13th Earl of Gurney stands in full evening dress and medals at a banqueting table. On it a silver coffee pot and a half-filled wine glass.
A Toastmaster in scarlet jacket and sash stands beside him; he has just rapped his gavel for silence.
13th Earl of Gurney
The aim of the Society of St George
Is to keep green the memory of England
And what England means to her sons and daughters.
I say the fabric holds, though families fly apart.
Once the rulers of the greatest Empire
The world has ever known,
Ruled not by superior force or skill
But by sheer presence. (Raises glass in a toast.)
This teeming womb of privilege, this feudal state,
Whose shores beat back the turbulent sea of foreign anarchy.
This ancient fortress, still commanded by the noblest
Of our royal blood; this ancient land of ritual.
This precious stone set in a silver sea.
Toastmaster My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. The toast is – England. This precious stone set in a silver sea.
13th Earl of Gurney and Voices England. Set in a silver sea.
He drinks. The National Anthem plays over as His Lordship comes rigidly to attention, while behind him, the Toastmaster exits, and the table is taken off. The Anthem ends.
Lights up on His Lordship’s bedroom. An ornate four-poster bed stage centre, and a wardrobe near a door stage left. Dressed in a traditional butler’s uniform, Daniel Tucker, his Lordship’s aged manservant, creakingly lays out his master’s dressing gown on the bed, while His Lordship undresses.
Tucker How was your speech, sir?
13th Earl of Gurney (dropping jacket absently on floor) Went well, Tuck. Englishmen like to hear the truth about themselves.
Tucker painfully picks up the jacket, while His Lordship sits on the edge of the bed.
13th Earl of Gurney The Guv’nor loved this bed.
Tucker Wouldn’t sleep anywhere else, sir.
13th Earl of Gurney Took it all over the world, Delhi, Cairo, Hong Kong. Devilish great man, the Guv’nor. Superb shot.
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Tucker (kneeling to take off His Lordship’s shoes) Did wonderful needlework too, sir. ‘Petit-point’.
13th Earl of Gurney (undoing his trousers) Tuck, I’m getting married again.
Tucker Yes, My Lord.
13th Earl of Gurney Miss Grace Shelley. Charles is right. Sake of the family. Gurney name. Been putting it off. Only Jack left.
Tucker This house used to be full of mischief . . . mischief . . .
13th Earl of Gurney Four young devils. Thought I was safe enough.
Tucker Master Paul would have been the 14th Earl.
13th Earl of Gurney District Officer at twenty-one. Dead at twenty-three. Beri-beri. Picked it up off some scruffy fuzzy-wuzzy in a dressing gown, shouldn’t wonder.
Tucker (getting up slowly) Young Richard used to play the xylophone.
13th Earl of Gurney And young Raymond killed in Malaya. Not one of ’em buried in England. Never seen their graves.
Tucker (crossing to the wardrobe with clothes) You could do that on your honeymoon, Your Lordship.
13th Earl of Gurney There’s still Jack.
They look at each other.
It’s all based on land, Tuck. Can’t have those knaves from Whitehall moving in. So it’s Miss Grace Shelley.
Tucker Is she anyone, sir?
13th Earl of Gurney No one. But Charles recommends her as good breeding stock. Family foals well. Sires mostly. There’s always room at the top for brains, money or a good pair of titties.
Tucker Miss Shelley seems well-endowed, sir.
He comes back with a flat leather case from the wardrobe. He opens it for His Lordship, who is deep in thought. Inside are four coils of rope, each eight feet long, made of silk, nylon, hemp and cord respectively.
Tucker Your Lordship?
13th Earl of Gurney What? Eh? (Looking.) Yes, I suppose so. Hard day. Need to relax.