Noonday demons

Peter Barnes

St Eusebius is in devotional exile in the desert, alone apart from a tower of his own excrement, enduring extreme physical deprivation for the betterment of his soul and apologising to the maggots that live in his festering flesh. After a desperate struggle with a Cockney demon that speaks through Eusebius's mouth, he is challenged by St Pior, a rival hermit, to a bizarre duel of piety. With a mixture of slapstick, rhetoric, religious fervour and red-blooded vernacular, Barnes creates a comic theatre of opposites. 'Noonday Demons' was premiered with 'Leonardo's Last Supper' in 1969 at the Open Space Theatre.