Peter Barnes' Red Noses, which won a London Observer Best New Play Award back in 1985, has been revived in raucous, bawdy fashion by The Actors Gang, a company that specializes in physical theater with a social bent.
Barnes wrote Red Noses in 1978, but it took "seven years to be produced, which is the same time it took Solomon to build his temple," he is quoted as saying in a program note. No doubt the play's content, and not just the size of its cast (23), made it such a problematic commercial venture. In the piece, Barnes launches an all-out, ballsy attack on the four pillars of society -- church, state, capitalism and royalty. It's hard to think of another radical playwright, not even Brecht or O'Casey, who can match the depth and ferocity of Barnes' contempt for those institutions.
Red Noses is set in Europe in the midst of the Black Plague, which killed millions of people in the 14th century. Because God, science and kings have all failed to stop this holocaust, a wandering monk, Marcel Flote (Jeremie Loncka), decides that maybe laughter is the only hope for the human race: "bright stars not sad comets, red roses not black death."
Flote then begins to put together a troupe of clowns to deliver his message, a message that sparks democratic, anti-establishment feelings in the populace. All sorts of common folk -- flagellants, misfits, revolutionaries, hookers and workers -- get caught up in this anarchistic tideswell, this crazy carnival. When they're not putting on an impromptu show, they are drinking, making love, carousing, giving the authorities the finger. The headiness of democracy and freedom saves them from the plague -- but not from the counter-attacks of the powers that be, who are led by Pope Clement VI (performed with chilling accuracy by a woman, Mary Eileen O'Donnell). The Pope swears to bring back submission and belief, the very chains the clowns have exchanged for their red noses.
Barnes' sprawling, epic-sized play is packed with colorful language, sacred and profane poetry, puns and gags, classical allusions, rude behavior, sexual hijinks. It has been directed -- choreographed, really -- by Dominique Serrand, director of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, which was founded in Paris in 1978 by graduates of the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theater. Serrand does an excellent job, helped no end by Rosalida Medina's outrageous and hilarious costumes.
