A ‘RED’ PLAGUE UPON THE BLUENOSES

“We hope never to consent to the deadly servitude of naturalism,” wrote British playwright Peter Barnes 15 years ago in the preface to his best-known work, “The Ruling Class.” His new piece at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Barbican Theatre, “Red Noses,” suggests that he has kept the faith.

The original title was “Red Noses, Black Death.” The hero is a priest who tours plague-ridden 14th-Century France with a troupe of zanies, hoping to counter the plague by putting on red noses and making people laugh--the Norman Cousins philosophy taken to the battlefield.

“His listeners literally keel over and ‘die laughing,’ ” reported the London Standard’s man-on-the aisle, Milton Shulman, who found this an apt reaction, considering the deadliness of the play’s one-liners (“Love thy neighbor, but don’t get caught doing it”). What, Shulman asked, was Barnes getting at?

The Guardian’s Michael Billington thought he knew. “I can think of no postwar play that demonstrates so vividly that Socialism should be a source of gaiety; and few that put on stage so tangible a vision of happiness, down to a Last Supper where a blind man wildly pours soup over people’s heads.”

Punch’s Sheridan Morley reckoned, with tongue in cheek, that “Red Noses” was a lot funnier than your usual play about the Black Death, and he also discerned a point:

“By viewing a time and place of unspeakable horror through the eyes of people who in later lives would doubtless have been staging the camp concerts at Dachau, Mr. Barnes has achieved his usual thesis about a stand-up comic being a lot more useful than a Pope in a real crisis.”

The Daily Telegraph’s John Barber admired Terry Hands’ sweeping production, but thought the play was less than met the eye. “When the plague ends and the priest shows signs of becoming a saintly individualist, he and his Red Noses are shot. The moral is unexceptional, of course. It is also sanctimonious.”

Nobody complained that Barnes had sold out to the kitchen-sink school.

“Chaplin”--which didn’t get off the ground when Civic Light Opera tried it out a couple of summers back--had a brief second try under the stars in Houston last month. From the reports, it’s still not off the ground, but perhaps closer.

Variety’s Houston correspondent reported that the show had “enormous potential” but that it still tended to “meander,” leaving the audience distracted from its true focus, Charlie Chaplin’s quest for his childhood. But “if the geography of the show confuses, star Anthony Newley works well.”

Joe Watts of “Inside Houston” liked Newley’s performance (“Newley’s Chaplin is many things, and most of them good”) and had no problem with the show’s book (“The evolution of the ultimate Charlie Chaplin is fully and quite ingeniously realized”). The problem? “It ain’t got no songs.”

Maybe a third tryout will turn the trick for this problem show.

New York, not wishing to lose any more theaters to the wrecker’s ball, has begun the process of landmarking Broadway houses--preventing the owners from destroying or changing them in any major way without a hearing.

The first three houses so designated are the old Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon); the old ANTA Theater (now the Virginia) and the Ambassador Theater. The first two are Nederlander houses, the second a Shubert house, and both organizations are not pleased. Appeals are planned.

Landmarks Commissioner Elliot Willensky is very pleased. “These theaters are of national--even international--importance,” he told the New York Times. “This was the starting point of spreading culture out to every town, every city in America.”

Added another commissioner, Anthony M. Tung: “We keep hearing from actors how the old theaters had it and the new theaters don’t.” And not just in New York.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Lighting designer Jules Fisher in “The Tony Award” (Crown): “When lighting is very good, it is hardly noticed. Now that I have won a Tony award, I must work even harder to keep my work unseen.”