Peter Barnes: Peter Barnes, who has died of a stroke aged 73, was an exhilarating English dramatist who never found a secure foothold in British theatre.
As a sworn enemy of naturalism, and writer of large-cast plays such as The Ruling Class and Red Noses, he was always swimming against the tide. But a Barnes play was always an exciting event; and running through all his work was a passionate belief that a joke can be an instrument of change rather than a diversion from reality.
Barnes was born in Bow, London, but his real inheritance was coastal rather than Cockney.
"I grew up," he wrote, "in a down-market seaside resort on the east coast where my parents worked in amusement arcades on the pier, and later owned two cafes on the seafront, along with the cockles and whelks stalls, the deckchairs, Punch and Judy booths and artists who would draw, with a pointed stick, elegant pictures in the wet sand."
That background may explain the carnivalesque element in his work. But Barnes was also a keen student of history. After education at Stroud Grammar School, RAF national service and a spell working for the London County Council, he became something of an autodidact. He not only took a correspondence course in theology, but clocked in daily at the British Museum Reading Room which became his study centre and office.
After working as a film critic, story editor and screenwriter, Barnes achieved theatrical fame in 1968 with a baroque comedy, The Ruling Class, presented at Nottingham Playhouse. Harold Hobson called it one of the best first plays of its generation; and it revealed Barnes's ability to say serious things in a funny way.
His hero was a 14th earl, deemed mad when he preached love and charity, and perfectly sane when he espoused Old Testament ideas of punishment and revenge.
Asked how he knew he was God, the hero replied: "Simple. When I pray to Him I find I'm talking to myself."
But behind the abundant invention and borrowings from Shakespeare, Verdi, the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields lay a socialist attack on the hereditary principle.
After success at Nottingham and a three-month West End run, the play was filmed in 1972 with Peter O'Toole turning in a vintage performance as the demented earl.
Barnes then wrote a series of plays offering nightmare visions of climactic moments from history. Leonardo's Last Supper (1969) showed the great artist, prematurely declared dead, achieving Lazarus-like resurrection in a filthy charnel-house.
The Bewitched, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974, was about the Spanish state's attempt to produce a rightful heir to the imbecilic and impotent Philip IV.
Most daringly of all, Laughter!, seen at the Royal Court in 1978, was a double bill that moved from the world of Ivan the Terrible to that of Auschwitz, and that exposed the mind-numbing bureaucracy that sustained the concentration camps.
Only a Jewish writer like Barnes could conceivably have treated Auschwitz as a source of black humour.
Even though he was never fashionable, the RSC stayed loyal to him and in 1985 produced Red Nose, arguably his best play and winner of an Olivier award.
It dealt with a sprightly priest, played by Antony Sher, who toured the plague-stricken areas of 14th-century France with a fraternity of fools known as God's Zanies. Like all of Barnes's best work, it celebrated the subversive power of laughter.
In recent years Barnes had turned increasingly to films, television and radio. His movie adaptation of Enchanted April, allegedly Bill Clinton's favourite film, won him an Oscar nomination in 1993. He wrote countless mini-series for American TV including Arabian Nights, Noah's Ark and The Bible.
And he wrote an outstanding series of monologues for BBC radio, Barnes's People, that attracted just about every top name in the business including Olivier, Gielgud, Guinness, Ashcroft, Dench and McKellen.
As a dramatist, Barnes kept on plugging away with comical-historical epics. Sunset And Glories (1990) was about the saintly Pope Celestine IV who was voted out of office.
Dreaming, set during the Wars of the Roses, surfaced briefly in the West End in 1999. And Jubilee, dealing with David Garrick's disaster-strewn Shakespearean celebration, opened at Stratford's Swan in 2001. It reminded us that Barnes's real debt was always to Ben Jonson rather than to Shakespeare, whom he once dubbed a "massive snob".
Barnes's prolific creativity was also accompanied by bountiful fertility in his private life. He became a father at 69 when his second wife, Christie, gave birth to a daughter, followed by triplets two years later.
Barnes turned the experience of late-life fatherhood into a screenplay, Babies, due to be filmed for television. He is survived by his second wife, Christie, and their four children.
Peter Barnes: born January 10th, 1931; died July 1st, 2004