The final item in this week’s series of video excerpts from the work of Howard Barker is Found in the Ground, the 2009 production of the Wrestling School at Riverside Studios.

Found in the Ground is one of Barker’s most recent lyrical plays, not a tragedy, as he notes in his brief essay on the drama below. Rather uniquely set in the present or the recent past, the play takes for its object of contemplation the concept of justice in the 21st century, in an age when the Enlightenment has failed utterly to provide its promised paradise on earth. The dramatist writes:

We’ve had to wait a while to be able to do this play as its scale was beyond our resources until now. It is a play of images and echoes from the Hitler period to the more recent past.  At the centre of it is an ex-Nuremberg judge whose contempt for his own culture compels him to destroy his priceless library.  His librarian and his daughter struggle to make sense of these actions, moving from love to hatred and back again.

Found in the Ground is entirely impressionistic, with a cascading number of scenes, all related but not always consecutive.  So it operates differently from all other plays of mine, by breaking down the narrative that has always been at the centre of theatre in my and nearly all dramatic text.

It is not a tragedy.  The characters don’t pass through the ordeal of their experiences, they react spontaneously, or carve out places for themselves in which to live.  I would call this a play of landscape rather than identity.

Hitler makes an appearance towards the end of the play.  Of course it is impossible to put Hitler on stage in any historical sense.  But I didn’t intend to do that.  I take a fragment of him, entirely imaginary.  He is a visitor to the place that he has (and the twentieth century has) created.

The production marks 21 years of The Wrestling School.  In 1988 we were simply satisfied to be mounting a large play at all.  Now it stands for something, an aesthetic which is controversial of course, but international in reputation.  I couldn’t have foreseen that.  I couldn’t have foreseen how many enemies we would make, nor how many friends.  The Company’s methods have developed, its aesthetic is refined, and I think its identity is now so distinctive I never think of it being in the theatre at all. It’s somewhere else …

My own notes on the Riverside Studio production are here.