BARKER: The word love is not uncommon in my work, but I only edged towards a meaning for it in The Europeans, which is subtitled Struggles to love. And here it is in many ways not mediated through the body as desire is. What Starhemberg does for — and also against — Katrin is to insist on her right to self-description, resistant to the categories invented for her by the State and refusing the false conciliations of history on the one hand, or parenthood on the other. His love for her is a love for her completion, her pursuit, which he perceives and perhaps judges more finely than she does herself. This certainly involves “doing the undoable.”

RABEY: The Power of the Dog‘s subtitle, Moments in History and anti-History, seems your first step towards identifying a mythic power in individual pasts as opposed to  national pasts. The power is increasingly identified with sexuality in your work, particularly in Women Beware Women and The Breath of the Crowd, which highlight exposure and realization of the unlived life, the uniqueness of each personal testimony and the sense of cumulative power involved in sexual encounters.

BARKER: There is little or no aperture in The Power of the Dog for celebration or the catalogue of restorative things that are commonly associated with the humanist theatre. But what it does assert is the capacity of individuals for alternative experience and private history, which both dives under and is swamped by collective politics. In a world of “Historical Method,” blunderingly performed by Stalin with materialist rhetoric, an alternative fetishism is created by the dislocated, a viable private madness in collective madness. …

Yes, I am against the solidarity of the audience. It is easily manipulated and frequently, albeit unconsciously, authoritarian. The best moments in theatre for me are those in which solitary movements can be discerned, in which a sense of contest can be registered between the stage and the disjointed audience. These solitary contests are, of course, determined by the fact of the existence of others; they would be harder to achieve in isolation. The tension created by an assumed collectivity of response, which then disintegrates, leaving individuals exposed to the effects of actions on the stage, is to me a valid condition of experiencing art. … I do not intend the individual to be without a guide. I come back to the actor, who by sheer bravery becomes the focus of hope and the source of security that cannot, in my work, be found in the usual forms of the message or the versimilitude. In the actor’s courage, the audience individual finds his own.

From “The idea of hidden life,” a conversation between David Ian Rabey and Howard Barker, 1989. This interview can be found in the excellent new collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, edited by Mark Brown, from Intellect Books and available on amazon.com here.