Write your abstract
here.
LAUGHTER! may be Peter Barnes' single greatest
work,
certainly it's condensed in expression and extreme in
audacity even for him. There's a leap of five centuries
between Act I, Tsar and Act II, Auschwitz, and an
almost
equally profound leap in language. The mediaeval
cadences
in which Ivan the Terrible speaks out the fear in his
soul
that drives him to grapple absolute power to himself,
could
not differ more from the dead, anti-imagistic language
of
the death camp bureaucracy which is the controlling
metaphor of Act II. The reason this transition is
workable
is that two voices, that of Samael the Angel of Death
(a
Russian bureaucrat in this transcription) and an
academic
historian who whitewashes Ivan's terrible career, give
a
foretaste, at the end of Act I, of the neurotic
obfuscation
that vainly tries to conceal the reality of Auschwitz
in
Act II. Also, the second act has a character, Gottleb,
(played by the same actor, in its first production, as
played Ivan the Terrible) whose primitive brutality is
a
match for the Tsar's.
(The most effective whitewash given Ivan the
Terrible is
by the pigeons who, at the end of act I, cover his
statue
in a blizzard of their shit.)
I've seen LAUGHTER! described as a double bill---
presumably on the analogy of an earlier Barnesonian
evening
of entertainment which conjoined two independent one
acts,
LEONARDO'S LAST SUPPER and NOONDAY DEMONS.
Anyone who
watches LAUGHTER! as if it were two independent one
acts is
liable to misread it profoundly; it is a two act play
linking a thread of ignobility in humankind across a
vast
span of space and time. (An allusion near the end of
Act II
casts it back in time again, more than a thousand years
to
the empires built on human sacrifice in South America---
not
yet the New World.) Barnes accepts---in fact strikingly
emphasizes---the contention that Auschwitz was a human
catastrophe far exceeding that of Ivan the Terrible's
regime---he does not accept that it represents a sharp
break in human character that's inexplicable in terms
of
our systems of human management and their broiling
discontents. Which would be a profoundly despairing
vision
if a) the damn thing weren't so bloody funny and b) he
hadn't shown an equally deep understanding in other
works
of other, finer human possibilities.