At first glance, the plays of Howard Barker and Samuel Beckett have precious little in common. Barker’s anti-Histories, recent concern with plethora and excess and the aristrocratic lyricism found in the dialogue of his characters sit uneasily with Beckett’s abstract minimalism and self-erasing language. But a few minutes’ thought reveals surprising parallels, especially when it comes to the later work of both dramatists. The spare theatrics and four-woman cast of Barker’s Slowly, produced this year, reveal at least scenographic common traits with Beckett’s three-woman Come and Go; Hurts Given and Received, also produced this year, is an essay on the cost of aesthetic creation also at the center of Catastrophe; and, reaching a little further back, the master/servant relationship of Toonelhuis and Lobe in last year’s Found in the Ground, as well as a decimated landscape, is surprisingly reminiscent of Hamm and Clov in Beckett’s Endgame (even to the extent that both Toonelhuis and Hamm are confined entirely to wheelchairs; justice is also a theme in both plays as well). At least in these limited comparisons, there appears to be considerable aesthetic companionship, and no doubt another few minutes’ thought would produce other parallels.

The later perspectives of both dramatists is also usefully considered through the prism of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in all four of its central facets (epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics). For the theatreworker, even Schopenhauer’s epistemology echoes through the basic construct of the aesthetic form of theatre. In the first book of The World as Will and Representation, as well as in Schopenhauer’s doctoral thesis On the Fourfold Root, the philosopher lays out an epistemology that will not surprise either dramatist or director. The necessary forms of consciousness — those which exist a priori and without which knowledge and consciousness, and therefore the empirical world, is not possible — are there described as Time, Space and Causality, this last entry divisible into various forms (four altogether) of cause-and-effect. Turning to the first page of any conventional drama, one finds these a priori forms stated as givens of the drama to follow. Time (today, the next day, yesterday, the 16th century); place (a crossroads marked by a tree, a bunker, Vienna); and finally a list of characters, demonstrating the forms of human motival relationships possible within the confines of the play, the narrative for which itself is based in the cause-and-effect relationships of the physical world (in movement) and conceptual world (in language). Any and all theatre is constructed of these a priori forms, without which something presented on a stage can’t be said to be theatre qua theatre, any more than, without these, the empirical world can’t be represented as the empirical world.

Since the ur-Modernist Schopenhauer, whose most pessimistic assessments about the world and the will were more than borne out in the history of the 20th century, Modernists have been investigating and stressing these a priori concepts in their own art as well, seeking through this stress an inference of the thing-in-itself that lies beneath the empirical world; theatre as the most phenomenal of these forms is where those stresses have been most tortuous. In the later plays of both Beckett and Barker, there has been less certainty about a definable time, space and causality as expressed in character and narrative, until in the work of both writers the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that this work is taking place here, in this space; now, at this time; and through the individuals we see on stage: the immediacy of the theatrical experience is nowhere more explicit than in the plays of these dramatists now. The stress and intensity of the work, as well as its seeming difficulty and obtuseness, is an effect ultimately of both dramatists’ projects to find through their work an inference of the thing-in-itself that lies beyond the empirical world: ultimately unknowable, but somehow demonstrable. It is reminiscent of Beckett’s early statement to a correspondent that his work exists to “To bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it — be it something or nothing — begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.” While this may best describe Beckett’s consideration of prose fiction at the time, it is just as applicable to his art of drama, once space, time, character and narrative are also seen as those empirical forms which must be compromised to reach a gleam of the thing-in-itself as contemplative or meditative state.

Barker’s language differs from Beckett’s in that his characters pour out character and motivation, and the director and designers fill the stage with painterly and precise excess, expressively — so expressively that the language overwhelms, the power of aristocratic eloquence to turn in upon itself and, like Beckett’s minimal speech, bore similar holes through a priori experience, utterly destroying the “either/or” dichotomy that most contemporary drama and theatre offer, per David Ian Rabey, for a “both/and” status of the theatrical experience.

The work of both dramatists also bears examination through the prisms of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics: this last an ethics not of pity, and especially self-pity, but compassion, which are poles apart. Beckett asks not for pity of the fallen condition even of the Pozzos and Hamms of his world, but of an understanding compassion which is their due, as is Barker’s Katrin, Galactia and several other characters, from those populating The Castle and Victory to Gertrude — The Cry and Found in the Ground. The road to this compassion is severe and calls into question the accepted forms of the empirical world to search further, for an aesthetic experience that will make that compassion possible for the spectator. But this is to get to Schopenhauer’s fourth book already, and there are further paths to be cleared before it emerges clearly. It is here that the parallels between these great dramatists, who may well emerge as the Shakespeares of the 20th and 21st century, may demonstrate the possibility of a theatre in the wake of catastrophe.