Howard Barker

The theatre of Howard Barker subverts myth and invents history in its pursuit of the meaning of individual integrity. Repudiating politics and asserting the primacy of the emotions, Barker’s tragedy is written in a language by turns poetic and brutally mundane. The effects are disconcerting and destabilizing, as he insists tragedy must be. The twelfth and final collection of plays from this celebrated, influential and widely-studied playwright includes:At Her Age and Hers, which uses Velázquez's painting Las Meninas to meditate on the making of a work of art, removing the figures from the frame, animating them, and assembling them again.Landscape with Cries, which invokes the savagery of the Peasants’ Revolt of fourteenth-century France to create an unlikely heroine. Womanly, a play which is alternatively dreamlike and nightmarish in its biography of Elbow, the aptly named protagonist who defies the conventional morals of her day. Four Dialogues which are small in size of cast, but ambitious in their confrontations with the ideas of faith, language, and longing. Struggling to define their needs, the characters come near to the final purpose of Barker’s dramatic endeavour – the discovery of a reason to exist.True Condition – both the title of the play and the name of an unseaworthy vessel – which tells of the final voyage of a boat crewed by criminals.

The latest collection of plays from one of the most celebrated, influential and studied playwrights in the English-speaking world. Howard Barker's plays continue to challenge, unsettle and expose.Barker’s theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year in a sordid room. Inevitably they are inspected by God, but in a shape none could have predicted and only he can delight in. In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker’s nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful words which arrive in sealed envelopes to prepare her for a succession of ordeals. Deep Wives and Knowledge and a Girl are short pieces, firmly established in the European theatre repertoire. In the first, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog. In Knowledge and a Girl, Barker reinterprets the Snow White fable from the perspective of the Stepmother.

The tenth collection of plays by Howard Barker, one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of our time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. Plays Ten comprises the plays Ahno, Distance, Critique of Pure Feeling, Irrespective, Immense Kiss, Exquisite.In Ahno, A Prince of Now, a youthful dictator is revealed as simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary, in politics and in love. His shocking efforts to create a new social order are mirrored in his unconventional passion for a seventy-five year old woman, who along with his devoted commissar, a group of fanatical priests, and a disturbingly perceptive Dalmatian, make up a menacing court of activists.In Exquisite, Barker’s theme is the ethical ambiguity of slavery. In a dimly feudal setting, but constantly referring to our time, unsolved murders decimate a stable community. The protagonist, a loyal and uncritical serf, declines to speculate on the cause, whilst at the same time possessing the power to put an end to it. His ambiguous relationship with authority, and his refusal to quarrel with his own status, reveals Barker’s heretical manner with moral platitudes.Alongside full-scale and even epic dramas, Barker has always written short works for small casts. In Distance he views the horrors of The Great War from an unusual perspective, that of the mother of a killed son, who arrives at her own philosophy of mourning. In Irrespective, a reclusive intellectual – in his final years – finds himself pestered for moral teaching by a wretched populace which has hitherto ignored him. In Critique of Pure Feeling, an old woman, sceptical of love but not of property, finds herself recklessly participating in an erotic duel. Immense Kiss, one of Barker’s most terrible visions, takes place as an army enters a besieged city, where a young conscript, discovering a woman abandoned in a room, finds himself stretched between longing and civility.

The latest collection of plays by Howard Barker, one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of our time. Internationally renowned, his plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The latest volume in Oberon's Howard Barker series comprises the plays Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews, In the Cloth Cathedral, In the Depths of Dead Love and More No Still.

This new edition of Barker’s seminal text Arguments for a Theatre outlinesthe theory and practice of his ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’. Author of over thirty plays, Howard Barker has long been an implacable foe of the liberal British establishment, and champion of radical theatre world-wide. His best-known plays are The Castle, Scenes from an Execution and The Possibilities. All his plays are emotionally highly charged, intellectually stimulating and have no truck with the theatrical conventions of what he terms the ‘Establishment Theatre’. These fragments, essays, thoughts and poems on the nature of theatre likewise reject the constraints of ‘objective’ academic theatre criticism. Rather they explore the collision (and collusion) of intellect and artistry in the creative act. This book is more than a collection of essays: it is a cultural manifesto.

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.

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

A New Testament informed by the turmoil ofthe 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.

"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…

The latest volume in Oberon's Howard Barker series comprises the plays Und, The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo, 12 Encounters With a Prodigy, Christ’s Dog and Learning Kneeling. Howard Barker is Barker is an internationally renowned dramatist. There has been a recent resurgence of presentations of his plays in Britain, with particularly acclaimed productions at the Arcola theatre and the Hackney Empire in recent years. He has a sizable following on the European mainland.

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.

In Slowly, 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 with its provocative ideas, pungent poetic language, and savage wit build a thought-provoking allegory of the artist’s relationship with society.

"(Uncle) Vanya," Barker's radical rewriting of Chekhov's classic, 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.

Includes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the Face.

Howard Barker is one of the most controversial British dramatists of his time. His plays unsettle, challenge, and expose. The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in the following four plays: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; and The Road, the House, the Road.

Howard Barker's alter-ego Eduardo Houth first materialised as the photographer of publicity images for Barker's theatre company. The Wrestling School, one among many fictional identities assumed by him 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 part of the intention. The result is a unique exercise in self-description, partisan but without the shrill self-justification so common in authentic autobiography. Barker/Houth's "A Style and Its Origins" is a literary creation, as befits its authorial origins; it is also a document of total originality and a rich source of dramatic and aesthetic history.

"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. "The Seduction of Almighty" is a touring theatre production by The Wrestling School in Autumn 2006.

Howard Barker is one of the most significant and contraversial 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. "Claw" concerns an underprivileged young man watching his so-called superiors. "Ursula" is Barker's typically intriguing take on the legend of St Ursula. "He Stumbled" is a fable concerning an anatomist and a dying king. "In The Love of a Good Man" we witness the mass burial of the dead.

Howard Barker's latest play has been inspired by the long distance fence 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, opens at the Birmingham Rep in June 2005, followed by a UK tour.