The Ruling Class opened in Nottingham, England on November 6, 1968, thanks to the foresight of two readers on the British Arts Council—drama critic Martin Eslin and director Stuart Burge—who read the script and pronounced Barnes "a bloody genius." Burge took the play to Nottingham and directed it himself. At opening night, London's Sunday Times drama reviewer Harold Hobson felt himself "suddenly and unexpectedly faced with the explosive blaze of an entirely new talent of a very high order." Although he knew nothing of this playwright on that evening, he later wrote the introduction to the printed play, declaring that the performance he saw on its opening night was the perfect combination of "wit, pathos, exciting melodrama, brilliant satire, doubled-edged philosophy, horror, cynicism, and sentiment."

When it moved to London in February of 1969, Robert Bryden of the Observer pronounced The Ruling Class "one of those pivotal...