My readers in the United Kingdom will be interested to hear that the world premiere of Howard Barker’s 2006 play The Forty, directed by David Ian Rabey, will take place at the Theatr y Castell in Aberystwyth, Wales, on 7 December and run through 10 December. The Wednesday-Friday performances are at 7.00pm and the Saturday matinee at 1.30pm; following the Thursday night performance, Rabey, a leading director and scholar of Barker’s work, will sit down for a brief dialogue with the playwright. Tickets and schedule information are available here.
A selection from Rabey’s program notes for the production is below. It is interesting to note his short description of the funding controversy that enveloped Barker’s own Wrestling School company in 2007. Apropos my post yesterday, it is a demonstration of what happens when institutions make grants decisions based upon an implicit and assumed aesthetic of what art should (and, by extension, shouldn’t) be doing, and whether it does (or doesn’t) qualify for government support:
Howard Barker wrote The Forty (Few Words) in 2006. The Wrestling School, the theatre company dedicated to presenting Barker’s work, scheduled a production of The Forty for touring in Autumn 2007 and planned to incorporate local community performers and students into an orchestrated silent chorus of movement … . However, in 2007 the government diverted £112.5 million pounds from the Arts Council of England to pay for preparation for London’s 2012 hosting of the Olympic Games. Rather than oppose this with any public demonstration of eloquence or conviction, the Arts Council of England responded by systematically excising the criterion of “Artistic Development” (the principal ground for The Wrestling School’s funding) from consideration in its awards, and rejected the application for The Forty as “insufficient priority.” This decision not to fund this particularly innovative project was a politically ominous and significant outcome of an arts funding policy which, in its documented “assessment criteria and priorities” of May 2007, privileged an ostensibly quantifiable social utility over any commitment to, or mention of, artistic development; thus, they further diminished rather than extended the range of theatre practice [emphasis mine -- GH]. In consequence, there was no Wrestling School production in 2007: one year short of its potential celebration of twenty years of highly acclaimed international work as an independent theatre company. …
Barker’s explorations of both the singular moment and the limits of language achieve a new formal concentration and beauty in The Forty, a compendium which stretches beyond even the ambition of collections such as The Possibilities and 13 Objects to present forty short plays, each concentrating on a moment of extreme emotional tension, and foregrounding the ways in which words and gestures provide currency for negotiation, where actions manifest and question the terms of statements, in a (possibly enticing) declaration of war for the terms of life. Many of the characters in The Forty are glimpsed at crisis points, as in that resonant phrase “at the end of their tethers” as we witness the seizing and/or dying of an impulse. Characters and audiences are brought, together, towards the negotiation of a wordlessness. These are elliptical narratives, in the sense of being so condensed as to be ambiguous: do they present a prelude, or an aftermath (or both)? The audience is invited to imagine further beyond, on the basis of an active, tensile incompletion in word and deed: a fateful hinge moment, and the surrounding tensile readiness, forceful disengagement, despairing submission, or shocking nonchalance. Anne Bogart notes how both violent events and powerful aesthetic experiences induce a silence, a space and time where “language ceases”:
We are left only with an awareness of the limits of language and the limits of what can be taken in. In this gap definitions disappear and certainty vanishes. Anything is possible — any response, any action or inaction. Nothing is prescribed. Nothing is certain.[]
This is a point similarly identified by Alphonso Lingis: “At the moment when none of the anticipated words are there, we are held in the present, a present disconnected from the chain of word-vectors of the past and from the anticipated conclusion.”[]
This is the focal point of The Forty. Barker brilliantly captures this sense of theatre’s transaction with the unknown and unknowable:
The play only appears to be about the living because the actors are living. The characters have never lived, nor by the same token, can they ever be said to be dead. Theatre is situated on the bank of the Styx (the side of the living). The actually dead cluster at the opposite side, begging to be recognized. What is it they have to tell? Their mouths gape …[]
Welcome to our forty journeys into the unspeakable; in search of…
Footnotes
Howard Barker’s Blok/Eko, produced last summer by the Wrestling School at the Exeter Northcott Theatre and directed by the author, “is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world.” The story:
