LITMIR.BIZ

Und , a play for one woman and six trays, is a moving study of dignityand self-delusion. When a guest, perhaps a lover, fails to appear foran appointment, his hostess invents excuses for his neglect, evenwhen ill-manners degenerate into barbarity. The hostess is Jewish, theinvisible guest a Nazi officer. The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo is the twelfth marriage of a very old manto a young woman a fraction of his age. Their mutual fascination isintensified but also rendered ambiguous by the fact that both are blind.The intellectual and erotic manoeuvres conducted between them areakin to a dance, and what begins as a hypothesis becomes a painfulexposure of the many meanings of intimacy. 12 Encounters with a Prodigy concentrates a theme Barker has exploredover many plays – the solitude of the precocious child. Kisster, an adoredorphan, has been taught to exploit the pity of the world for his ownadvantage. From inside his fortified personality, Kisster manipulates ahost of predatory characters, keeping at bay angels and vagrants in hisstruggle to survive.In Christ’s Dog the dying Lazar, arch-seducer and bigamist, treads out ajourney he feels compelled to undertake to reach accommodation withhis past. At every stage of his search, a different version of the untoldstory of Christ’s dog is proposed to him. Lazar understands that hisseemingly worthless life – akin to the mongrel that howls at the foot ofthe cross – is a critical element of human morality. Learning Kneeling is perhaps the most terrible of Barker’s works, a playof apparently unredeemed extremity, relieved by a wit and a scrupulousintensity of thought that renders it a tribute to human persistence andimagination. Sturdee, a legless man of property, finds his home andhis mistress seized by terrorists, the leader of whom, Demonstrator byname and instinct, leads him into a nightmare of ambiguities.

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‘I came to the city. I saw the people were filthy. And those who were not filthy were still filthy…’Sodom. The day before the city’s total annihilation. Among the grimy tables of a run-down café, an angel tells Lot that God wants him to flee, before the city is obliterated. However, Lot’s irresistible wife has other ideas… As the angel and Lot’s wife embark on a dangerous game of seduction, cruelty and desire, we are drawn ever deeper into the dark and impenetrable forest that is the marriage between Lot and the bewitching woman he worships…‘I must learn to keep my mouth shut when there are angels in the room…’

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Commissioned to paint a vast canvas celebrating the triumphant Battle of Lepanto, the free-spirited Galactia creates instead a breathtaking scene of war-torn carnage. In her fierce determination to stay true to herself, she alienates the authorities and faces incarceration. Her younger lover Carpeta is approached to take over and seizes the assignment for himself.Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution makes sixteenth-century Venice the setting for a fearless exploration of sexual politics and the timeless tension between personal ambition and moral responsibility, between the patron’s demands and the artist’s autonomy.Art is opinion, and opinion is the source of all authority.This edition includes a new essay by Howard Barker, entitled The Sunless Garden of the Unconsolled: Some Destinations Beyond Catastrophe .

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The Fence in its Thousandth Year was inspired by the long distance fence whilst it was under construction in the Gaza to separate the Palestinian and Jewish communities.Set in a world of rising frontiers and illegal immigration, The Fence uses powerful poetic language, provocative ideas and rich, dark humour to build a compelling epic about scandal in a ruling monarchy and its subsequent downfall.At the heart of this tale is the intensely personal story of a blind boy’s struggle to discover his true identity in a world where nothing is what it seems… The Fence , produced by the Wrestling Company, opened at the Birmingham Rep in June 2005, followed by a UK tour.

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Includes the plays I Saw Myself , The Dying of Today , Found in the Ground and The Road, the House, the Road Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand her compulsion to transgress the laws of her society comes into collision with the conventions of an art form. In the weaving of a tapestry Barker's13th century heroine privileges private life over public responsibility. If she is cruelly punished she is also granted self-awareness. A critical moment in social decay is also at the centre of The Dying of Today , in which a stranger who luxuriates in the telling of bad news observes the effects of his devastating narrative on a humble barber. The barber's recovery from pain, and the beauty of his sensibility, bring the two strangers into an emotional proximity. Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground , a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his wayward daughter's struggle to make meaning from the atrocities of the 20th century. The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in The Road, the House, the Road . Erasmus' obscure colleague Aventinus was found dead on a wintry road. How he arrived at his solitary death forms the subject of this speculation on scholarship, mischief and the murderer's vocation.

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A young man rushes to reach the bedside of his dying father, but arrives too late. His younger brother was present at the death, but his attitude is strangely ambiguous, and the elder brother becomes suspicious. The intentions of the dead man's mistress are also unclear. The mourners become increasingly consumed by feverish imagining, building a powerfully tense atmosphere as their characters start to disintegrate.This new play by international dramatist, poet and theorist, Howard Barker, toured in a production by The Wrestling School theatre company in 2005.

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Includes the plays Claw , Ursula , He Stumbled and The Love of a Good Man The plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw , a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its terrible conclusion marked the debut of a vivid dramatic imagination. In Ursula Barker's engagement with the pains of the past, and his way of reinvigorating ancient arguments reaches a high point in his treatment of the legend of St Ursula and the martyrdom of 11,000 virgins, where the virtues of celibacy and marriage are set against the catastrophic passion of a woman described as a 'perfect liar'. Barker's scrutiny of the body and its complex meanings is never more intense than in He Stumbled , the tragedy of a celebrated anatomist whose last dissection becomes his own. The body as a site of political and personal investment is also at the heart of The Love of a Good Man , an early work set on the empty battlefields of the Great War, where the burial of the dead becomes a pretext for private ambition as well as national grief.

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A New Testament informed by the turmoil of the twentieth century, The Ecstatic Bible is a series of interlocking narratives based around the 100-year courtship of a faithless priest and a woman whose decision to abandon free will and collude with every circumstance leads them into extraordinary situations both comic and horrific. Passionate and provocative, this bible of amorality is driven by a wildly inventive plot and language rich in poetry and humour.

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Includes the plays The Castle , Gertrude – The Cry , Animals in Paradise and 13 Objects .Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The plays in this volume examine collisions of culture, gender and creed at moments of turmoil, developing the tragic form Barker defines as Theatre of Catastrophe. The Castle is set at the end of Crusades and describes the clashes that occur when returning soldiers bring an Arab architect home with them as a prisoner. Barker's abiding interest in interrogating the great classics for their 'silences' is shown in Gertrude – The Cry , his re-writing of the Hamlet story. Scarcely examined in Shakespeare, the passion of Gertrude for Claudius is made the centre of this harrowing tragedy, casting new light on the personality of Hamlet himself. Animals in Paradise was commissioned by the Swedish and Danish governments to celebrate their connection by bridge, a symbolic finish to centuries of antagonism. Barker's unexpected treatment of the theme provoked unrest on its first showing. 13 Objects movingly reveals the investment we make in inanimate things, their power to unsettle us, and how their talismanic qualities license new ways of seeing the world.

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Two new plays by Howard Barker Slowly As barbarians approach the palace of a decaying culture, four princesses debate their fate. Decorum demands suicide. But, for some, the possibility of life is all too compelling. In a culture of conformity, it may not be up to the individual to decide… Hurts Given and Received Howard Barker re-examines the creative life of the artist through one of his most fascinating and appalling creations. Provocative ideas, pungent poetic language, and savage wit build a thought-provoking allegory of the artist’s relationship with society.‘Barker, with witty, wicked glee, pricks the pomposity of the tortured artist.’ – The Times ‘Howard Barker’s new play is an ambiguous interrogation of the artistic impulse.’ – Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out London

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