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Howard Barker

Howard Barker
Born28 June 1946
Camberwell, London, England
OccupationPlaywright, theatre director, poet
Notable worksScenes from an Execution, Victory, The Castle, The Possibilities, The Europeans, Arguments for a Theatre, Judith, Gertrude - The Cry

Howard Barker[1] (born 28 June 1946)[2] is a British playwright, screenwriter and writer of radio drama, painter, poet, and essayist, writing predominantly on playwriting and the theatre.[3] The author of an extensive body of dramatic works since the 1970s, he is best known for his plays Scenes from an Execution,[4][5][6] Victory,[6] The Castle,[6][5] The Possibilities,[5][4] The Europeans, Judith[4] and Gertrude – The Cry[6][4] as well as being a founding member of, primary playwright for and stage designer for British theatre company The Wrestling School.

The Theatre of Catastrophe

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Barker has coined the term "Theatre of Catastrophe" to describe his work.[7] His plays often explore violence, sexuality, the desire for power, human motivation and the limits of language.

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.[citation needed] "We must overcome the urge to do things in unison", he writes. "To chant together, to hum banal tunes together, is not collectivity."[7] Where other playwrights might clarify a scene, Barker seeks to render it more complex, ambiguous, and unstable.[citation needed]

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."[citation needed]

Themes

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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 BBC Radio 3 and starring Glenda Jackson in 1984, 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. . ."[8] However, 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",[9] is called upon to use her considerable brilliance in fortifications and tactics to save her besieged city. Each choice she makes appears 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.[citation needed] Barker's heroes are drawn into the heart of the paradoxical, fascinated by contradiction.

The 1995 edition of the encyclopaedic The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes Barker as a playwright "adept at choosing telling dramatic situations in which many different incidents can take place, but he reverses what might be regarded as the moral expectations [as well as] the expected moral order of capitalist societies. […] Barker deliberately attempts to upset expectations, denying the value of reason, continuity and naturalism, but there is a certain predictability about his wildness. His characters seem to be at emotional extremes, to speak in the same overwrought, rhetorical language."[10]

Productions

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Barker has acknowledged he has had greater success as playwright internationally than in his home country of Britain and many of his plays have been translated into other languages. He has noted that his plays have been more successful when performed abroad in America, Australia and Europe,[11] especially mainland Europe where Barker has been celebrated as "one of the major writers of modern European theatre".

In Britain, Barker is "largely unknown" and he has been described as "cut[ting] a Byronic dash in British Theatre – sardonic, detached, the insider's outsider."[10] Barker's work has influenced and inspired a number of notable British playwrights, including Sarah Kane, David Greig,[12] Lucy Kirkwood,[13] and Dennis Kelly.[14] Noted actors Ian McDiarmid[15] and Fiona Shaw[16] have received acclaim for their performances in Barker's plays.[17]

In Britain, Howard Barker formed The Wrestling School Company in 1988 to produce his own work in his native country.[18]

There has been a small flurry of productions of Barker's plays on the London Fringe since 2007, including some non-Wrestling School productions which seem to fare better critically. Notable among these have been Victory[19] and Scenes from An Execution,[20] which received acclaimed productions at the Arcola and the Hackney Empire respectively. In 2012 the National Theatre staged a production of Scenes from an Execution, starring Fiona Shaw and Tim McInnerny.

Works

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Stage plays

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Radio plays

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Television plays and films

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Other writings

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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), the text for Flesh and Blood, a dramatic scene for two singers and orchestra by David Sawer, and three collections of writings on the theatre (Arguments for a Theatre, Death, The One and The Art of Theatre, A Style And Its Origins).

Personal life

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Barker divorced in the 1980s and has lived on his own in Brighton since then.[21]

Further reading

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References

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  1. ^ "Index entry". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved 12 October 2011.
  2. ^ "Howard Barker Biography (1946-)". Filmreference.com. Retrieved 21 December 2008.
  3. ^ "Howard Barker webpage on The Wrestling School website". Archived from the original on 15 March 2023. Retrieved 6 August 2004.
  4. ^ a b c d Barker, Howard (2016). Arguments for a Theatre (fourth ed.). London: Oberon Books. back cover. ISBN 9781783198054.
  5. ^ a b c Barker, Howard (15 November 1997). Arguments for a Theatre (third ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. back cover. ISBN 0719052491.
  6. ^ a b c d Barker, Howard (2004). Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (Kindle ed.). Routledge. ISBN 0-415-34986-9.
  7. ^ a b Barker, Howard (15 November 1997). Arguments for a Theatre (third ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-5249-1.
  8. ^ Barker, Howard (2004). Collected Plays Vol. 2: Includes Love of a Good Man, the Possibilities, Brutopia, Rome, Uncle Vanya, and Ten Dilemmas. London: Calder. ISBN 978-0-7145-4182-2.
  9. ^ Barker, Howard (1992). A Hard Heart; The Early Hours of a Reviled Man. London: Riverrun Press. ISBN 978-0-7145-4228-7.
  10. ^ a b Banham, Martin (2000). The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Corrected ed.). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. p. 78. ISBN 0-521-43437-8. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  11. ^ interview with Howard Barker by Nick Hobbes on The Wrestling School Website
  12. ^ Hattenstone, Simon (1 July 2000). "A sad hurrah". The Guardian.
  13. ^ Hemming, Sarah (10 January 2020). "Lucy Kirkwood on going from kitchen to courthouse with 'The Welkin'". Financial Times. London. Retrieved 11 October 2020.
  14. ^ Kelly, Dennis; Aberg, Maria (4 March 2005). "DENNIS KELLY AND MARIA ABERG: THE GODS WEEP". TheatreVoice (Interview: Audio). Interviewed by Aleks Sierz. Retrieved 19 March 2010.
  15. ^ "Past Productions". Archived from the original on 2 June 2016. Retrieved 17 August 2015.
  16. ^ "Scenes from an Execution, National Theatre, review". 5 October 2012.
  17. ^ Irvine, Lindesay (6 December 2006). "Podcast: Howard Barker talks". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 21 December 2008.
  18. ^ "The Wrestling School". Thewrestlingschool.co.uk. Archived from the original on 28 May 2016. Retrieved 21 December 2008.
  19. ^ Gardner, Lyn (10 March 2009). "Victory". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 4 May 2010.
  20. ^ Gardner, Lyn (17 January 2007). "Scenes from an Execution". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 4 May 2010.
  21. ^ "Howard Barker: 'I don't care if you listen or not'", The Guardian, 1 October 2012
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