Sunsets and Glories

‘Barnes is one of the great unrecognised geniuses of the English theatre of the past couple of decades.’

Plays & Players

Set in late thirteenth-century Italy, where power struggles between Church and State inspire such characters as the spineless Charles II, paid killer Montefelto and ‘madwoman’ Maifreda. Into this maelstrom steps Peter de Morrone, the saintly Pope Celestine V, provoking a bitter crisis of faith in the abiding values of violence and corruption. Once again, Peter Barnes’ mordant wit takes history and imbues it with a savage humour.

Sunsets and Glories premiered at the newly-opened West Yorkshire Playhouse on 28 June 1990

Peter Barnes is a writer and director whose work includes The Ruling Class, Nottingham and Piccadilly Theatre, London (1969); Leonardo’s Last Supper and Noonday Demons, Open Space Theatre (1969); Lulu, Nottingham Playhouse (1970); The Bewitched, Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London (1974); Laughter!, loyal Court Theatre, London and Red Noses, Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican, London (1985). His television work includes Revolutionary Witness, BBC (1989). His three short plays Nobody Here But Us Chickens, which he also directed, was first broadcast on Channel 4 in 1989 as was The Spirit of Man for BBC2. He has written numerous films and radio plays including Barnes’ People, BBC Radio 3 (1981-85) and More Barnes’ People, BBC Radio 3 (1989-90), and has adapted and edited extensively for the theatre.

Peter Barnes

Sunsets and Glories

Contents

Introduction

Act one

Act Two

Epilogue

Introduction

It is all imagined: the Middle Ages, Waterloo, 1066. History is not history unless it is imagined. No one I know was present in the distant past, so the past, like the future, is an act of imagination. The ghosts are all here and now and with us always. We conjure them up, clothe them with historical facts and call them Caesar and Alexander and say they are real. But even those of us who live in the past only live there in our imaginations. It is not real - not even yesterday.

‘Life is like a river.’

‘Why?’

‘How should I know. Am I a philosopher?’

I am coming to feel all the big ideas about God, faith, free-will, and the rest are fascinating games but not something, in the end, you should, perhaps, commit yourself to; live or die for. Particularly, when it seems, they answer nothing in a soulless universe.

All I can do is tell stories and leave the big ideas to priests and politicians who will steal the whites of your eyes if you let them get close enough.

‘Eureka, it’s finished! It’s a winner, I can smell it!’

‘What’re you going to call it, Signor Bocaccio?’

‘I thought, maybe The Decameron, That has a ring to it. It may be just a collection of filthy stories to you, Fred, but mark my words, it’ll be a classic’.

Have you heard the story of the death of the Emperor Claudius? It seems that he ‘bubbled up his ghost’ at a banquet when he was listening to a troupe of comics. Which just ...