Brian Woolland is the author of a major study of Peter Barnes's work, Dark Attractions: the Theatre of Peter Barnes, published by Methuen in the autumn of 2004 – too late to take more than brief note of the playwright's death in July. The following critical retrospective serves, then, both as a valedictory postscript to the author's full-length study and as a critical afterword to the personal tributes paid to Peter Barnes by Alan Rickman, Charles Marowitz, and Elaine Turner in NTQ80. Brian Woolland is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Reading. His research interests are in Renaissance theatre in performance, modern European theatre, and theatre in education. He also works as a playwright and as a theatre director.