LITMIR.BIZ

Includes the plays Victory , The Europeans , The Possibilities and Scenes from an Execution .Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. These plays are among his best-known works, and their energy, poetic language and imagination have fixed them firmly in the international repertoire.Exploring the tragic form defined by Barker as Theatre of Catastrophe, three of the plays speculate on human behaviour in moments of historical crisis. Victory is set in the English Civil War and follows the ethical voyage of a widow towards personal reconstruction. The Europeans takes one of the great eruptions of Islamic imperialism as the background for a young woman's insistence on her right to her own identity. Scenes from an Execution shows the struggle of an independently-minded artist against the power of the Venetian state. The Possibilities , a disturbing series of short plays set in various times and cultures, reveals Barker's unconventional way with moral dilemmas.

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"The Seduction of Almighty God" is set during the dissolution of the monasteries, a critical moment in the history of the English priesthood. The loss of faith and cynical corruption of the few priests left at the Abbey of Calcetto is unexpectedly challenged by the arrival of a young man with an unsullied and passionate belief in God. The boy Loftus gradually acquires a huge moral ascendancy through the intensity and purity of his faith, but he is then brutally punished by the priests. Powerful poetic language, provocative ideas and rich, dark humour build a thought-provoking allegory for one of the key issues of our times. Howard Barker invents a world of shocking and universal metaphor in a place that might be anywhere struggling with the rise of extreme belief and the dangerous distorted power it unleashes.

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Howard Barker's alter-ego Eduardo Houth first materialised as the photographer of publicity images for Barker's theatre company The Wrestling School, one of many fictional identities assumed by the playwright to screen a range of his activities, including set and costume design.Writing of himself in the third person and in the historic tense, Barker/Houth achieves a fluency and an uncommon measure of objectivity, though objectivity is scarcely the sole intention. The result is a unique exercise in self-description, partisan but without the shrill self-justification so common in a mere autobiography. Barker/Houth's A Style and its Origins is very much a literary creation; it is also a totally original document and a rich history of the dramatist and his aesthetic.

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Howard Barker’s theatre is characterized by its tragic scale and its distinctive way of exposing the unconscious resistances that underlie apparent social unanimity, both in the sexual and political spheres.Barker’s play, BLOK/EKO , is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world. Eko, an ageing despot, seemingly on a whim liquidates the entire medical profession, asserting that consolation – in the form of song – is a better way with sickness than drugs or surgery. A connoisseur herself, she knows great song is itself the distillation of suffering and so deliberately exposes her greatest poet Tot to a life of crime, poverty and humiliation in order to extract from him his finest work. BLOK/EKO is the first outcome of Barker’s residence as Creative Fellow at the University of Exeter (2010-2012) and the main element of his Plethora/Bare Sufficiency project.

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Includes the plays Judith , (Uncle) Vanya , A House of Correction , Let Me and Lot and His God Barker’s radical rewriting of Chekhov’s classic (Uncle) Vanya brought him more controversy than most of his other works put together. Interrogating not so much Chekhov’s text as the use to which society has put it, Barker turns Vanya’s defeat into victory and converts a play of sadness into a tragedy of desire. A House of Correction is a meditation on cause and effect. Set on the eve of a war which may destroy a society, the seemingly arbitrary arrival of a messenger with a vital communication sets off an agonizing train of events in the lives of three desperate women.Few works of drama can have plumbed the depths of solitude and rage that characterize Let Me , a nightmare set on the frontiers of the Roman Empire during the barbarian invasions. Biblical narratives serve as the origin of two shorter works, of which Judith is a contemporary classic of cultural conflict, a reinterpretation of the status of the heroine in Israel’s war of survival against the Assyrians. In Lot and His God , the imminent destruction of Sodom simultaneously licenses the moral decay of an angel and the erotic epiphany of an adored wife.

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Includes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the FaceHoward Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose.Both The Last Supper and Seven Lears exemplify Barker's way with great religious and literary stories, the first placing the wilful suicide of a Christ-like prophet, Lvov, in the context of modern chaos, illuminating his moral ambiguities with comic or painful parables, the second taking its inspiration from the significant absence in Shakespeare's play, that of Lear's wife, the queen whose murder is here discerned as the origin as the great family tragedy.The execution of the Russian royal family remains shrouded in mystery – not least that of the identity of two bodies discovered in the mass grave years after the event. In Hated Nightfall Barker's speculative imagination leads him to identify these as the children's tutor, Dancer, and a recalcitrant servant, Jane. Dancer is perhaps Barker's archetypal hero, febrile, iconoclastic, yet in search of a self-sacrifice nothing appears to justify. In Wounds to the Face, our complex and sometimes violent relations with our own physiognomy form the psychological link between related scenes of wounding, notoriety, shame and vanity in a play of kaleidoscopic energy and imagery.

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For more than three decades Howard Barker has argued passionately against the deformation of English theatre by social realism. Insisting on the primacy of tragedy over all art forms in Western culture, his elaboration of a tragic form for our time – identified by him as The Theatre of Catastrophe – is the theme of this collection of lectures and essays. Barker’s repudiation of entertainment, his insistence on the sterility of debate in theatre, and his conviction that conscience is never an adequate pretext for dramatic action, mark him out as a unique and provocative voice in world theatre.

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The Trojan legend and the character of Helen form the basis for The Bite of the Night . As with all Barker’s mythical and historical works, it is overlaid and undermined by a contemporary narrative, in this instance the search for the origin of the erotic undertaken by the redundant university teacher Dr Savage and his nihilistic student, Hogbin. Through all twelve Troys, Savage and Helen struggle with a passion both intellectual and physical, and the idea of beauty is refined to a terrifying degree. In Brutopia Barker’s controversial portrait of the humanist Thomas More is shaped around his strained relationship with his daughter Cecilia, here discovered to be the author of a counter-text to her parent’s infamous Utopia . Cecilia’s wit and cruelty mark her out as one of Barker’s least compromising and heroic young women. The Forty is a significant departure from Barker’s dramatic practice, his investment in language reduced to a few phrases which punctuate detailed scenes of conflict and solitude. Physical movement, and intense concentration on gesture show the author’s flair for visuality in a new and surprising way. The theme of sacrifice features increasingly in Barker’s theatre, and in Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward it is a mother’s refusal to apologize for an act of passion – notwithstanding the dire consequence for her own child – that is at the heart of the argument. Set in a home for terminally-ill patients, many of whom create a hilarious chorus around the protagonists, Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward shows Barker’s imagination in its most startling form.

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Howard Barker’s form of tragedy – his Theatre of Catastrophe – is a speculation on the way individuals dislocated by social or personal crises make meaning from their pain, sometimes willing their own extinction, sometimes altering the terms on which they might continue to exist. Their actions are not judged and no attempt is made to influence or console. In Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews , a gifted musician is banished to the remotest region of an empire by an autocrat he had complacently regarded as a patron and a friend. A moral and intellectual duel is played out over the distance of a thousand miles. In the Depths of Dead Love is set in a feudal China. A similarly exiled man scrapes a living by renting out his peculiar property – a bottomless well – to aspiring suicides. Among these is a married couple who exert an appalling influence over him. As in all great tragedy, an uncomfortable vein of comedy runs through the work, not to relieve but to intensify its contradictions… In the Cloth Cathedral describes the rise of an assassin, the killer of an archbishop who he condemns for preaching religion without God. His prosecutor, a brilliant but tormented lawyer, finds himself seduced by the integrity of the criminal’s character, ending up as his accomplice. One of the finest discordant duets in Barker’s work, the warring protagonists are surrounded by a chorus of the vengeful, the forgiving, and the dead… More No Still is set in yet deeper chaos. The female protagonist Sway takes refuge from the nausea of debate by substituting practised poses for articulated speech. In her search for a model society, she is accompanied by an escaped criminal with whom she finds a city of rampant roses and draconian laws. She falls in love for the first time – not with the city’s governor, a reactionary priest – but with his infant self who exists simultaneously and in the same dimension. Barker’s capacity for meditation and the most daring theatrical imagination are here combined with particular intensity.

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