Howard Barker
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Howard Barker (born 1946) is a British playwright.
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[edit] The Theatre of Catastrophe
Barker has coined the term 'Theatre of Catastrophe' to describe his work. His plays often explore violence, sexuality, the desire for power, and human motivation.
Rejecting the widespread notion that an audience should share a single response to the events onstage, Barker works to fragment response, forcing each viewer to wrestle with the play alone. "We must overcome the urge to do things in unison" he writes. "To chant together, to hum banal tunes together, is not collectivity."[1] Where other playwrights might clarify a scene, Barker seeks to render it more complex, ambiguous, and unstable.
Opposing the predominance of comedy in the contemporary culture, which unifies us through the banality of a shared response, he argues for the rebirth of a tragic theatre, which will force us to recognize our differences. Only through a tragic renaissance, Barker argues, will beauty and poetry return to the stage. "Tragedy liberates language from banality" he asserts. "It returns poetry to speech." [2]
[edit] Themes
Barker frequently turns to historical events for inspiration. His play Scenes from an Execution, for example, centers on the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and a fictional female artist commissioned to create a commemorative painting of the Venetian victory over the Ottoman fleet. Scenes from an Execution, originally written for Radio 3 and starring Glenda Jackson in 1986, was later adapted for the stage. The short play Judith revolves around the Biblical story of Judith, the legendary heroine who decapitated the invading general Holofernes.
In other plays, Barker has fashioned responses to famous literary works. Brutopia is a challenge to Thomas More's Utopia. Minna is a sardonic work inspired by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Enlightenment comedy, Minna von Barnhelm. In Uncle Vanya, he poses an alternative vision to Anton Chekhov's drama of the same name. For Barker, Chekhov is a playwright of bad faith, a writer who encourages us to sentimentalize our own weaknesses and glamorize inertia. Beneath Chekhov's celebrated compassion, Barker argues, lies contempt. In his play, Barker has Chekhov walk into Vanya's world and express his disdain for him. "Vanya, I have such a withering knowledge of your soul," says the Russian playwright. "Its pitiful dimensions. It is smaller than an aspirin that fizzles in a glass. . ." [3] But Chekhov dies, and Vanya finds the resoluteness to stride out of the confines of his creator's world.
Barker's protagonists are conflicted, often perverse, and their motivations appear enigmatic. In A Hard Heart, Riddler, described by the playwright as "A Woman of Originality" [4] is called upon to use her considerable brilliance in fortifications and tactics to save her besieged city. But each choice she makes seems to render the city more vulnerable to attack, but that outcome seems to exhilarate rather than upset her. "My mind was engine-like in its perfection" she exults in the midst of destruction. [5] Barker's heroes are drawn into the heart of the paradoxical, fascinated by contradiction.
[edit] Productions
Though he is relatively unknown in his own country, Barker's works have earned him a sizable following on the European mainland, and many of his plays have been translated into various languages. In Britain, a theatre company called the Wrestling School was formed in 1988 by admirers of Barker's works to produce the author's seldom-performed plays in his native country. Their name is an allusion to the idea that performers and other theatre professionals must 'wrestle' with the ideas presented in the text before presenting them to the public; a notion of conflict and struggle in line with the spirit of Barker's writing.
[edit] Selected Plays
- Claw,Stripwell, and Fair Slaughter (1977)
- The Love of a Good Man (1981)
- Crimes in Hot Countries (1982)
- A Passion in Six Days and Victory (1983)
- The Power of the Dog, Scenes from an Execution and The Castle (1985)
- Pity In History broadcast on BBC2.
- The Possibilities (1987)
- The Bite of the Night and The Last Supper (1988)
- Brutopia and Seven Lears(1989)
- The Europeans, Golgo and Judith (1990)
- Uncle Vanya (1991)
- A Hard Heart, Ten Dilemmas and Ego in Arcadia (1992)
- Rome and Minna(1993)
- Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the Face (1995)
- The Gaoler's Ache for the Nearly Dead (1997)
- Ursula; Fear of the Estuary (1998)
- Und (1999)
- The Ecstatic Bible (2000)
- He Stumbled (2000)
- A House of Correction (2001)
- Gertrude - The Cry (2002)
- 13 Objects and Summer School (2003)
- The Quick And The Dead (2004) broadcast on Radio 3.
- Dead Hands (2004)
- The Fence In Its Thousandth Year (2005)
- The Road, The House, The Road (2006) broadcast on Radio 4 to commemorate his sixtieth birthday.
- Let Me (2006) broadcast on Radio 3 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Third Programme (Radio 3)
- The Seduction of Almighty God by the Boy Priest Loftus in the Abbey of Calcetto, 1539 (2006)
- Christ's Dog (2006)
- I Saw Myself (2008)
[edit] Other Writings
Barker has also authored several volumes of poetry (Don't Exaggerate, The Breath of the Crowd, Gary the Thief, Lullabies for the Impatient, The Ascent of Monte Grappa, and The Tortman Diaries), an opera (Terrible Mouth with music by Nigel Osborne), and two collections of writings on the theatre (Arguments for a Theatre and Death, The One and The Art of Theatre).
[edit] References
- ^ Howard Barker. Arguments for a Theatre'. Third Edition. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 17.
- ^ Ibid., 18.
- ^ Howard Barker. Uncle Vanya. In Collected Plays: Volume Two. (London: Calder Publications, 1993), 330.
- ^ Howard Barker. "A Hard Heart and The Early Hours of a Reviled Man" (London: Calder Publications, 1992), 6.
- ^ Ibid., 42
