In 2005 The Wrestling School produced Howard Barker’s The Fence, a rare response from the dramatist to a contemporary event, specifically the long-distance fence that separates the Palestinian and Jewish communities in Gaza. (His 1985 The Castle was inspired by the dramatist’s consideration of the nuclear arms race.) Barker’s scenography, demonstrated in the excerpt of the production below, emphasized separation and intimacy through the forbiddingly cold barrier of the steel threads of this fence. From the Wrestling School’s Web page for the production:

Howard Barker builds a compelling metaphor for two agonies; the agony of cultural conflict, racial antagonism, mutual incomprehension, suspicion and mistrust with all its attendant mythology, and the agony of blindness, both literal and that which refuses to see. These explorations of deprivation and mutual hostility are bound together in a single narrative in which The Fence is a powerful barrier that must be overcome in order to move both individuals and society forward.

It is an interesting sample of Barker’s uniquely poetic and contemplative dramatic and theatrical considerations of real-world (such as it is), contemporary events.