Monthly Archives: July 2010

Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground

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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.

 

Index

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It’s always been a bit of a crapshoot, clicking on those category and tag links that usually reside (as they do here) in the right-hand column of most blogs. For those who have little enthusiasm for seeking needles in haystacks, I’m glad to say that a rather more informative index to the posts currently on this blog is now available here.

And for those also seeking information on theatre minima‘s next 2010 event, I’m glad to say that an announcement of details for an upcoming production will in all likelihood be made here next week. High time too, some would say; stay tuned.

Howard Barker’s I Saw Myself

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Howard Barker’s I Saw Myself was the twentieth anniversary production of the Wrestling School, staged in London in 2008. It is one of several Barker plays to examine the role of the artist in society, a concern which first arose with the early No End of Blame and Scenes from an Execution. In I Saw Myself, the widowed Sleev attempts to weave her personal and sexual autobiography into a tapestry, an advancing army just days away. From the Wrestling School Web page for the play:

Howard Barker’s last work on the role and responsibility of the artist in society was the internationally acclaimed Scenes From An Execution. Here this theme is further explored with the artist character ferociously denying the importance of depicting the collective experience to insist on her right to tell her own story. Her punishment is cruel but her courage never deserts her. In her struggle to survive war and social hostility, and her determination to complete her individual vision of events, Howard Barker has created his most outstanding female character since Gertrude — The Cry.

 

Schopenhauer, Beckett and the Sottisier notebook

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Though most criticism has studied Schopenhauer’s philosophy in regard to the early Samuel Beckett of Proust and Murphy, after Beckett’s immersion in Schopenhauer’s work in the early 1930s, Ulrich Pothast notes that Beckett revisited the philosopher in the late 1970s and early 1980s, years during which he engaged in a quasi-systematic re-reading of Schopenhauer’s work (any reading which includes the rather dry epistemology of On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason must have been quasi-systematic; as Pothast notes, “I do not know of any other artist who, like Samuel Beckett, would not have been content with reading Schopenhauer’s standard writings … but would undertake the considerable effort to read and understand a systematically relevant but in fact … rather dry book like On the Fourfold Root” Pothast 16). Many of Beckett’s notes of that period on Schopenhauer’s philosophy were written in Beckett’s Sottisier notebook, now in the Reading University Library, between July 1979 and December 1980.

Pothast’s The Metaphysical Vision discusses Schopenhauer’s thought in relation to Beckett’s work only through Waiting for Godot, but the writer’s late 1970s study of Schopenhauer suggests an avenue into the great works of Beckett’s final period: from 1979′s Company through 1987′s Stirrings Still, and encompassing the final stage work from Rockaby (1980) through What Where (1983). These works especially evidence the Schopenhauerian conception of the artistic process as the creation of works for disinterested contemplation and meditation. While it was never Beckett’s intention at any point in his career to put Schopenhauer’s thought into fiction and drama, echoes of the philosopher’s work find their way into not only the content but also the form of this final work, which includes what Ruby Cohn in A Beckett Canon called “The Beckett Masterwork,” Ill Seen Ill Said. The subject-object relation of the listener and the storyteller in Ohio Impromptu; the viciousness of the will acting through the body in both Catastrophe and What Where; the ceaseless thrumming of the tortured consciousness seeking only a peace in nothingness of Stirrings Still — all of these suggest that Schopenhauer was perhaps the most pervasive philosophical influence on Beckett during his last decade, an influence that was after all life-long.

Like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Beckett’s work is neither optimistic nor pessimistic: like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, however, it might be considered “anti-optimistic,” sharing the quality of dark compassion for the suffering and the dead, optimism as an “absurd, wicked way of thought, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of human kind,” and it provides no hope for redemption in this world. (I would suggest that this “anti-optimism” is also a central trait of Howard Barker’s plays.) In the final analysis, Billie Whitelaw’s sighed “fuck life” of Rockaby is indeed resignation and contemplation, not itself angry or bitter, useless values in a world which can be no different than what it is. The tortured expressions of Beckett’s speakers reflect their tortured bodied experience, however quiet and whispered: a strain of genius shared by philosopher and poet alike. And a difficult accomplishment, however necessary.

Howard Barker’s The Fence

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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.