Howard Barker: Plays Nine


Book Description

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.




Howard Barker: Plays Eleven


Book Description

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.




Howard Barker's Theatre: Wrestling with Catastrophe


Book Description

Howard Barker and The Wrestling School have been seen as marginal to the major concerns of British theatre, problematic in their staging and challenging in the ideas they explore. Yet Barker's writing career spans six decades, he is the only living writer to have been accorded an entire season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and The Wrestling School produces theatre of such a striking quality that it earned continuous Arts Council funding for nearly 20 years. Wrestling with Catastrophe challenges existing ways of reading Barker's theatre practice and plays and provides new ways into his work. It brings together conversations with theatre makers from in and outside The Wrestling School, with first-hand accounts of the company's practice, and a selection of critical readings. The book's combining of testimony from key Wrestling School practitioners with alternative practical perspectives, and with analysis by both established and emerging scholars, ensures that a spectrum of understanding emerges that is rich in both breadth and depth. In its consideration of the full range of Barker's aesthetic concerns - including text, direction, design, acting, narrative form, poetry, appropriation, painting, photography, electronic media, technology, puppetry, and theatre space - the volume makes a radical re-evaluation of Barker's theatre possible.




Howard Barker: Plays Twelve


Book Description

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.




Body and Event in Howard Barker's Drama


Book Description

This book explores questions of gender, desire, embodiment, and language in Barker’s oeuvre. With The Castle as a focal point, the scope extends considerably beyond this play to incorporate analysis and exploration of the Theatre of Catastrophe; questions of gender, subjectivity and desire; God/religion; aesthetics of the self; autonomy-heteronomy; ethics; and the relation between political and libidinal economy, at stake in 20 other plays by Barker (including Rome, The Power of the Dog, The Bite of the Night, Judith, Possibilities, I Saw Myself, Fence in Its Thousandth Year, The Gaoler’s Ache for the Nearly Dead, The Brilliance of the Servant, Golgo, among others).




Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death


Book Description

Barker has been acclaimed as 'England's greatest living dramatist' in The Times and as 'the Shakespeare of our age' by Sarah Kane. His uniquely stylish work brings together startlingly original forms of classical discipline, moral ruthlessness and catastrophic eroticism. This study considers the full range of his theatrical achievements.




Cloud 9


Book Description

A two-act play in which preconceptions about gender, romance, and "lifestyle" are scrambled, neutralized, and possibly even rebuilt.




Staging the Past in the Age of Thatcher


Book Description

This book investigates how the British theatrical community offered an alternative and oppositional historical narrative to the heritage culture promulgated by the Thatcher and Major Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s. It details the challenges the theatre faced, especially reductions in government funding, and examines seminal playwrights of the period – including but not limited to Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Sarah Daniels, David Edgar, and Brian Friel – who dramatized a more inclusive vision of history that gave voice to traditionally marginalized communities. It employs James Baldwin’s concept of witnessing as the means by which history could be deployed to articulate an alternative and emergent political narrative: “the history we haven’t had”. This book will appeal to students and scholars of theatre and cultural studies as well as theatre practitioners and enthusiasts.




Howard Barker: Plays Nine


Book Description

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.




Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s


Book Description

Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s equips readers with a fresh assessment of the theatre and principle playwrights and plays from a decade when political and economic forces were changing society dramatically. It offers a broad survey of the context and of the playwrights and companies such as Complicité and DV8 that rose to prominence at this time. Alongside this it provides a detailed examination based on fresh research of four of the most significant playwrights of the era and considers the influence they had on later work. The 1980s volume features a detailed study by four scholars of the work of four of the major playwrights who came to prominence: Howard Barker (by Sarah Goldingay), Jim Cartwright (David Lane), Sarah Daniels (Jane Milling) and Timberlake Wertenbaker (Sara Freeman). Essential for students of Theatre Studies, the series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced from the 1950s to 2009. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights besides other theatre work from that decade, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Readers will understand the works in their contexts and be presented with fresh research material and a reassessment from the perspective of the twenty-first century. This is an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1980s.