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Red Noses
While the Black Death fills fourteenth-century Europe with fear, Father Flote leads a traveling band of comedians in hopes of offering redemption through laughter
109 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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Peter Barnes
147 books13 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. This entry is for the English playwright and screenwriter.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 19, 2026
France, 1348. God has outsourced His wrath to rats, and the Black Death has reduced Auxerre to a town of bad smells and worse odds.
Dr. Antrechau, the local physician, offers his patients a hundred percent failure rate across every known treatment: wine and they die, no wine and they die, hot meat and they die, cold meat and they die. The College of Physicians of Paris has helpfully traced the cause to the sun sucking up the Great Sea in the form of white mist, and the cure is, just like in Harvard amd Malaga, the obvious public Jew-burning.
Into this cheerful panorama stumbles Father Marcel Flote, a monk given to violent full-body convulsions he is pleased to interpret as divine inspiration. When he accidentally beats up Grez, Master of Flagellants, with a club theoretically aimed at his own penitential flesh, Flote hears God clearly for the first time. He straps on a bulbous red clown's nose and recruits the world's least promising apostles.
Marguerite, a nun incandescent at being denied rape as a penance. Brodin, a former soldier who draws beautifully and kills professionally. Rochfort, a flute-playing aristo in rusty armour. Sonnerie, a bell-ringing mute whose percussion answers every theological question better than the Council of Trent. Le Grue, blind and magnificently overconfident, who leads the troupe on a night march to Avignon and delivers them, with great ceremony, back to Auxerre. And Frapper, a stutterer whose jokes take four hours to reach their punchline.
The Floties, as they come to be known, travel to Avignon and earn a papal blessing from Clement VI, who receives them through a magnifying mirror to avoid contagion, seated between two open braziers his physician swears will singe the plague worms.
The Church sanctions the red noses because a laughing peasant is a pacified one. Flote's actual crime, as Clement understands, is running an unauthorised distribution network for a product the Church holds the monopoly on: salvation.
Peter Barnes wrote this play in 1978. It took nine years to reach the stage, the same time, as Barnes drily observes, that it took Solomon to build his temple. Barnes was born in 1931 in Bow, East London, and spent his career writing plays of ferocious ambition and deliberate difficulty, among them "The Ruling Class," which became a 1972 film with Peter O'Toole playing a homicidal aristocrat who believes himself to be Jesus Christ. He died in 2004, having been consistently admired and consistently under-produced.
Red Noses is a theological farce with the bones of a Marx Brothers film. The Floties are tolerated as long as they are convenient and condemned the moment they gather enough moral weight to become dangerous.
This is the mechanism by which every counter-cultural movement has been processed since the Sermon on the Mount. Absorb it, brand it, sell it back. The 1960s became a cologne. Punk became a Walmart fashion line. Flote became an archbishop's insurance policy.
The play asks whether laughter can survive its own success. Brodin, the reformed soldier who discovered he had lost the taste for blood because laughter had turned him soft, meets an end that is simultaneously the funniest and most devastating scene in the play, and to describe it further would be a crime against future readers/audience and an injustice to Barnes. Rochfort, the chicken-nibbling aristo whose loyalty is as deep as his boredom permits, makes a choice in Act Two that costs more than he calculated and reveals Barnes at his most morally complex.
We live in an age in which every corporation employs a Chief Happiness Officer, every authoritarian government sponsors a state comedian, and every revolution gets a streaming adaptation before the tear gas has cleared. Clement VI would have thrived as a venture capitalist. Monselet, his Archbishop of convenient orthodoxy, would have excelled in middle management, composing passive-aggressive memoranda about brand alignment.
The single reservation worth stating is that Barnes writes at a pitch of sustained intensity that can feel, across a long reading, like being lectured at by a very loud genius. Every character philosophises at the point of a sword. Every scene carries full dramatic voltage. But I have a feeling that on stage it would be non-stop marvelous.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Dr. Antrechau, the local physician, offers his patients a hundred percent failure rate across every known treatment: wine and they die, no wine and they die, hot meat and they die, cold meat and they die. The College of Physicians of Paris has helpfully traced the cause to the sun sucking up the Great Sea in the form of white mist, and the cure is, just like in Harvard amd Malaga, the obvious public Jew-burning.
Into this cheerful panorama stumbles Father Marcel Flote, a monk given to violent full-body convulsions he is pleased to interpret as divine inspiration. When he accidentally beats up Grez, Master of Flagellants, with a club theoretically aimed at his own penitential flesh, Flote hears God clearly for the first time. He straps on a bulbous red clown's nose and recruits the world's least promising apostles.
Marguerite, a nun incandescent at being denied rape as a penance. Brodin, a former soldier who draws beautifully and kills professionally. Rochfort, a flute-playing aristo in rusty armour. Sonnerie, a bell-ringing mute whose percussion answers every theological question better than the Council of Trent. Le Grue, blind and magnificently overconfident, who leads the troupe on a night march to Avignon and delivers them, with great ceremony, back to Auxerre. And Frapper, a stutterer whose jokes take four hours to reach their punchline.
The Floties, as they come to be known, travel to Avignon and earn a papal blessing from Clement VI, who receives them through a magnifying mirror to avoid contagion, seated between two open braziers his physician swears will singe the plague worms.
The Church sanctions the red noses because a laughing peasant is a pacified one. Flote's actual crime, as Clement understands, is running an unauthorised distribution network for a product the Church holds the monopoly on: salvation.
Peter Barnes wrote this play in 1978. It took nine years to reach the stage, the same time, as Barnes drily observes, that it took Solomon to build his temple. Barnes was born in 1931 in Bow, East London, and spent his career writing plays of ferocious ambition and deliberate difficulty, among them "The Ruling Class," which became a 1972 film with Peter O'Toole playing a homicidal aristocrat who believes himself to be Jesus Christ. He died in 2004, having been consistently admired and consistently under-produced.
Red Noses is a theological farce with the bones of a Marx Brothers film. The Floties are tolerated as long as they are convenient and condemned the moment they gather enough moral weight to become dangerous.
This is the mechanism by which every counter-cultural movement has been processed since the Sermon on the Mount. Absorb it, brand it, sell it back. The 1960s became a cologne. Punk became a Walmart fashion line. Flote became an archbishop's insurance policy.
The play asks whether laughter can survive its own success. Brodin, the reformed soldier who discovered he had lost the taste for blood because laughter had turned him soft, meets an end that is simultaneously the funniest and most devastating scene in the play, and to describe it further would be a crime against future readers/audience and an injustice to Barnes. Rochfort, the chicken-nibbling aristo whose loyalty is as deep as his boredom permits, makes a choice in Act Two that costs more than he calculated and reveals Barnes at his most morally complex.
We live in an age in which every corporation employs a Chief Happiness Officer, every authoritarian government sponsors a state comedian, and every revolution gets a streaming adaptation before the tear gas has cleared. Clement VI would have thrived as a venture capitalist. Monselet, his Archbishop of convenient orthodoxy, would have excelled in middle management, composing passive-aggressive memoranda about brand alignment.
The single reservation worth stating is that Barnes writes at a pitch of sustained intensity that can feel, across a long reading, like being lectured at by a very loud genius. Every character philosophises at the point of a sword. Every scene carries full dramatic voltage. But I have a feeling that on stage it would be non-stop marvelous.
❤️ 🇮🇱
July 27, 2016
Like a cross between the Pythos's Life of Brian and Holy Grail, Barnes's satire on religion and the dark ages has plenty of bite, and he's not afraid to be direct in his critiques. When the Black Death kills a third of Europe, Father Flote puts away traditional ministry to create a band of holy fools who attempt to bring joy to the dying. Other characters from there period (flagellant monks, grave robbers, goldsmiths, and other assorted dimwits) try to impede their work, but even the pipe supports them, at least until the plague is over.
Hilarious, but requires a huge cast, and the text would benefit from a little trimming.
Hilarious, but requires a huge cast, and the text would benefit from a little trimming.
January 26, 2015
Red Noses is a beautiful play for those, who like me do not share a great passion for scripts as opposed to descriptive narratives. Red Noses features a mixture of emotion, death and friendship, wrapped up and delivered in a combination of characters whom most wouldn't dream of putting together. I'd thoroughly recommend this text although it takes a little bit of going to get over the initial 'Shakespearean' language barrier if you will.
June 4, 2010
I love this script and playwright. I have directed and acted this show (different productions) and directed several of his one-acts. Barnes is the real deal and this story about standing up for what you believe in is a gem. I'd give it more stars if I could.
November 23, 2014
would've been way more enjoyable without the rape trivialization, thanks
May 19, 2022
I really hated this play.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews