The Ruling Class

About the Play

Peter Barnes' The Ruling Class (1968) is a savage farce about inherited power, and one of the strangest things about it is how tender it can be. When the 13th Earl of Gurney dies in an absurd accident, the title falls to his son Jack, a gentle, unwell man who is quite certain he is God. Not a vengeful God, but the God of Love. Jack forgives everyone, embraces everyone, and insists that the universe is kind. His family is mortified, and eager to protect the name and the fortune, they set about having him 'cured'.

The cure works. Jack emerges composed, respectable and fit for his seat in the House of Lords. Jack is now privately convinced that he is Jack the Ripper. That is the version society can live with. The loving madman was an embarrassment, and now the cold one (the new Jack) is one of them. Actually Christianity (I argue) is not being mocked here. If anything, loving Jack is the New Testament made flesh (grace with no conditions attached). What Barnes touches on is the rejection of all that. A respectable world that can't stomach radical, undignified love and is far cosier with judgement, punishment, and a tidy order. The cross stays on the wall, and the rope is what they actually believe in.

Barnes called it a "comedy of extremes," and he built it that way with music-hall numbers and vaudeville with genuine horror & savagery dressed up in song. I find the whole movie hilarious and also grueling. Underneath the chaos sits the idea that the most dangerous madness is the kind polite society has agreed to call sanity.