“The Ruling Class” opens with an accidental suicide so abrupt, so grotesque and so kinky that you catch yourself laughing. The dark satire, a breakthrough for British writer Peter Barnes, stages the turn to madness of the Gurneys, a musty clan of the English nobility.
The play, produced by WAVE Productions, follows the unraveling of the Gurneys’ morbid Victorian mores after Jack — the new heir to the family’s seat in the House of Lords and a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he’s God — suddenly appears in the manor drawing room, besieging the household with the force of all his lunacy.
Under Alex Harvey’s direction, the 11-member cast explores the whole range of the script’s comedy. From the supreme absurdity of an avian mating ritual — performed by Jack (Communication senior Erik Hellman) and his fianc
