Category Archives: Howard Barker

Howard Barker: The Love of a Good Man (1978)

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The 1978 Sheffield Crucible production, with Jim Broadbent (Flowers) and David Blake Kelly (Gentleman). Photo: Gerald Murray.

Play in three acts. First performed at the Crucible Studio Theatre, Sheffield, 19 October 1978. Directed by David Leland. With Roger Sloman (Hacker), Toby Salaman (Prince of Wales), Richard Butler (Bride), Natasha Perry (Mrs. Toynbee), Corrinna Seddon (Lalage), and others. Text in Plays Three, London: Oberon Books, 2008, pp 255-335. First published in The Love of a Good Man/All Bleeding, London: John Calder, 1980, pp 1-70 (out-of-print). Also in Howard Barker: Collected Plays Volume 2, London: John Calder, 1993 (out-of-print).

Barker’s notes on the RSC Warehouse production can be found here.

“The Love of a Good Man is a play about war and the class conflict which underlies the great military confrontations and massacres of our time. The play opens at Passchendaele in 1920 with the Prince of Wales surveying the scene of past carnage, now being turned into a giant cemetery. From this bleak landscape the author constructs a picture of the real issues of the war, the attitudes that survived it and the different and conflicting motivations of officers and men, the contractors who build after the destruction and the others still living, including the families whose lives and outlook have been torn to pieces by events.”[1]

“The body as a site of political and personal investment is also at the heart of The Love of a Good Man, an early work set on the empty battlefields of the Great War, where the burial of the dead becomes a pretext for private ambition as well as national grief.”[2]

The Love of a Good Man is among several Swiftian “state-of-the-nation” satires that Howard Barker wrote in the late 1970s; that it is one of the very few that appear in the Oberon Books edition to date exemplifies the status of the play as significant in the dramatist’s career. It is among the first to demonstrate Barker’s consideration of the human body — dead or alive — as corpus, and thus an object for manipulation and exploitation by authority as well as the self.

Hacker, characterized as “an Undertaker” in the Oberon list of characters, is charged by the British government with the construction of a cemetery in Belgium in which the thousands of British WWI dead will be buried. Before long, his project is challenged from two sources — first, the upper-class Mrs. Toynbee, who hopes to retrieve her son’s body for burial in a garden behind her house, and second Bride, a Commissioner for War Graves, who hopes to rush the cemetery to completion so that the Prince of Wales can open it in a timely manner. In both cases, the bodies — Mrs. Toynbee’s and those of the dead — become objects of trade and manipulation. Her social status allows Mrs. Toynbee to promise her body to whoever might contribute to the completion of her mission; the dead bodies, no longer conscious agents, become emblems of the nation-state, or bravery, or what-have-you, the definition of which is determined by state authority. The veterans who provide the labor to build the cemetery soon re-enlist, granting their bodies as cannon fodder to a government engaged in putting down the Irish rebellion at home.

Hacker’s dilemma leads to a variety of comically macabre shell-games with the dead bodies themselves, and the play is shot through with Barker’s stringent humor, which even in his more recent plays is not entirely absent, however much he abandoned satire in the early 1980s. The Bishop who consecrates the cemetery at the beginning of Act Three has one of the most darkly comic monologues in the Barker canon. His sermon:

Why God likes pain. (Pause.) Always being asked that one, why God is so very fond of pain. (Pause.) Because He is. Wriggle around it as we might, it’s inescapable, He must like pain. His own and other people’s. He must approve of it. And this is as good an occasion to mention pain as any. Better than most, in fact. Because we are situated in a sea of it. An Atlantic of stilled agony. (Pause. He examines his fingers a moment.) Well, I will not apologise for Him. I am always apologising for Him. It’s getting a bit much. It is, in fact, becoming something of an outrage. This mission — this so-called callling — (He plucks his robes.) — which consists in making the vile palatable, and finding symmetry in the hideous, it is becoming an impertinence. Fear not. I do not deny the existence of the person God. I merely ask what sort of character He has. I ask you, would you let Him near your child? Because, quite frankly, I would not! (Oberon edition, pp 316-317.)

It is not only organized, traditional, and state-sponsored spirituality which is satirized in the play, however; The Love of a Good Man ends with a farcical seance at which Mrs. Toynbee hopes to communicate with her dead son, a seance which ends in ludicrous chaos.

Barker’s 1970s state-of-the-nation plays, taken singly, comically examine a variety of British institutions (war and remembrance in The Love of a Good Man, crime and punishment in The Hang of the Gaol, party politics in That Good Between Us and other plays), but what differentiates The Love of a Good Man from the others is the new centrality of the human body and the examination of its dialectics within authoritarian cultures.

Extended discussions of the play can be found in both Rabey (pp 102-108) and Lamb (pp 187-193). In his unpublished essay “Institutions, icons, and the body in Barker’s plays, 1977-1986,” Ian Cooper writes:

… Barker places the body both literally and symbolically at the centre of the play: it is alienated, used as an icon, and invested with mystic status in order to preserve hegemony in existing power relations. It can be commercially exploited (by Hacker), invoked to exert symbolical power (by the Prince of Wales), or treated as an object to be subjected to the imperatives of social engineering (by Lalage). The battlefield itself is eroticised by Mrs. Toynbee who senses “No two women have ever been surrounded by so much male flesh”; the Bishop later conceives of it in terms of its orchestrated containment of pain, “an Atlantic of stilled agony”; Bride sentimentalises the setting as a monument or cathedral to the fallen. Hacker more prosaically treats it as a commercial opportunity for cost-effective sanitised disposal, dignified by appeal to the patriotic concepts of duty and of soil bought with English dead, but actually demonstrating the erosion of any ideals of physical sanctity: his desperation drives him to provide a German body to satisfy Mrs. Toynbee’s quest for her son’s remains. However, Hacker proves ultimately unsuccessful and realises that the promise, even of this situation, will prove hollow: he will ultimately be redesignated Mrs. Toynbee’s social inferior. The Love of a Good Man is thus a notable early example of Barker placing characters in a landscape wracked by catastrophe, and tracing their attempts to bring order into the chaos created by history and their own emotions.

Footnotes
  1. Jacket copy of the John Calder edition. [↩]
  2. Jacket copy of the Oberon Books edition. [↩]

The subterranean history of Europe and the martyrs of love

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Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Photo: Jeremy J. Shapiro.

Adorno is not particularly known for his writings on eros (indeed there are few). But, after doing a reading of and research into Howard Barker’s early play The Love of a Good Man, I came across the below passage from the 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer, which could stand as a legend not only for The Love of a Good Man but also for most of Barker’s middle and late plays as well:

Beneath the known history of Europe there runs a subterranean one. It consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization. From the vantage point of the fascist present, in which the hidden is coming to light, the manifest history is also revealing its connection to that dark side, which is passed over in the official legend of nation states, and no less in its progressive critique. …

Most mutilated of all is the relationship to the body. … Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus. In humanity’s self-abasement to the corpus nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material. The compulsion toward cruelty and destruction stems from the organic repression of proximiity to the body, much as, according to Freud’s inspired intuition, disgust came into being when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. …

In the fiendish humiliation of prisoners in the concentration camps, which — for no rational reason — the modern executioner adds to the death by torture, the unsublimated yet repressed rebellion of despised nature breaks out. Its full hideousness is vented on the martyrs of love, the alleged sexual offenders and libertines, for sexuality is the body unreduced; it is expression, that which the butchers secretly and despairingly crave. In free sexuality the murderer fears the lost immediacy, the original oneness, in which he can no longer exist. It is the dead thing which rises up and lives. He now makes everything one by making it nothing, because he has to stifle that oneness in himself. For him the victim represents life which has survived the schism; it must be broken and the universe must be nothing but dust and abstract power.[1]

Footnotes
  1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp 192-196. [↩]

From the archives: Narrative authority

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UPDATE (22 March): Aleks Sierz responds.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I rerun today an essay from last April regarding the issues of narrative authority and traditional storytelling in the theatre. The key paragraph:

… those formal experimentalists who dispense with traditional narrative, in at least some cases, are engaged in the politically and metaphysically radical project of restoring meaning-making authority to the individual spectator rather than imposing that interpretation on an audience-as-collective. When one gives oneself over to or “loses oneself” (in that particularly evocative term) in a narrative, one gives that authority over to another — that is, the storyteller, who always has ideological ends of his own, even if that end is “merely” to entertain (and it never is, the term “entertainment” itself an ideologically-loaded construct): the listener drinks the Kool-aid, in that oft-used term. But that term originated with Jonestown, and drinking the Kool-aid in its original context didn’t mean becoming an automaton or a True Believer: it meant death. In this case, it means the death of the imagination, the suicide of individual agency itself. Aesthetically speaking, there is something profoundly conservative and authoritarian, if not reactionary or paleo-conservative, about this. It is this individual agency that artists like Foreman and Barker intend to restore and celebrate, even if it must be at the cost of allowing the self to be absorbed in a story told over the campfire. They provide encouragement and incentive to find oneself, not to lose oneself, in the theatrical experience.

It was originally published on 26 April 2011.

Reading some of the reactions to Deborah Pearson‘s “The Necessity of Narrative?” in Exeunt, to which I pointed last Friday, makes you think that Ms. Pearson had strangled somebody’s kitten. Isaac Butler suggests that Pearson needlessly reduces the idea of narrative to genre conventions rather than addressing more complex constructions, and that her idea that “people like stories because they’re babies in need of a security blanket” is condescending (though Butler puts those words into Pearson’s mouth). Tony Adams counters: “You cannot have a work of performance free from narrative. Something happens. That is an event. Our brains are hard wired to create them even if they may not exist. Even if you were hypothetically able to create a performance in a laboratory, where nothing happened. There were no events. The act of performing that work before an audience would create its own narrative.”

To be fair to Ms. Pearson, it should be noted that her essay is far more ambivalent about narrative than these reactions suggest, and she discusses two recent productions (Tim Crouch’s intriguing The Author and Ridiculusmus’ Tough Time, Nice Time) in which this ambivalence is theatricalized. In the latter play especially, as she describes it:

Surprisingly, given the company’s reputation for experimental performance, this piece employs several techniques that screenwriting guru Robert McKee describes in his book, Story. The characters are consistent and easy to describe in a sentence – one is unimpressed and the other is eager to please. There is a unity of time and setting, complete with the ultra realistic touch of steam occasionally rising from their bath. And as McKee advises writers to up their stakes as the story progresses, building to a final moment of climax or resolution, the non-writer’s stories follow this by rote. His anecdotes become gradually more extreme, more upsetting, until they build to one final story that could be argued to act as a kind of climax.

And yet the writer remains unimpressed throughout – bored and over saturated by the very act of story telling. The audience leaves the theatre aware that they have been pulled in to a narrative by the same principles that the piece itself condemns. And yet the “controlling idea” (another term often employed by McKee) is clear and cohesive – there is a moral to the story: Narratives are a problematic way of processing experience. The content and form of the piece contradict each other. The piece successfully proves its point by employing the very device it criticizes. Narrative emerges from the experience as dangerous, effective, possibly inescapable …

Both Pearson and her critics circle around an issue which is central to this question of narrative in the theatre but which goes unexamined, and that’s narrative authority: who is telling the story, who is making the decisions about which events are crucial to the unfolding of a narrative and which events are inessential. The saying that “History is written by the victors” is, in a nutshell, an exemplar of the issue of narrative authority.

Some dramatists have seized upon the problem as a central theme of both their discourse and their formal experimentation, and, instead of attempting to tell a compelling story or present a compelling narrative, concentrate on the interstices of the on-stage events that make up an evening of theatre. In this work the impulse to storytelling (and to being subsumed within the telling of a story) is constantly undermined by violent fragmentation of the human urge to both telling and listening to a well-rounded narrative — and, in fragmenting and frustrating this desire, to invite the individual audience member to fit these on-stage events into their own matrix of interpretation instead of having this matrix imposed upon the events by the artist: to create one’s own story, rather than having a story eliminate alternative interpretations through the logic of its expected progression through time, in conforming to the “well-made” story, as that “well-making” is ideologically defined by the dramatist and the director.

This is a politically and socially as well as individually liberating radical project, as the work of Richard Foreman and Howard Barker demonstrate, though their radicalism is of distinctly different types. Foreman disdains any claim to creating narrative, explaining in a 1990 interview with Ken Jordan his moment of epiphany:

I’m slightly embarrassed to tell you what I saw in my head, but it did lead to my theater. I saw a particular static moment from my seat in the Circle in the Square where I watched a rather dreadful production of The Balcony. And I remember seeing Shelley Winters, on one side of the stage, and Lee Grant on the other, and it was just a moment of stasis, and a moment of a kind of tension between them, and I just wanted to make a whole play that had nothing except that unresolved tension between them. And I wrote out of that. I said that’s what I want in the theater, just that moment, and it doesn’t develop into any of the other awful stuff, the psychological stuff, the narrative stuff, the adventure stuff that it always develops into.

Undermining received ideas of the well-made story is also Howard Barker, who develops not only what he calls “anti-histories,” but anti-canons as well. In Barker’s version of the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya, Vanya’s bullet finds its target, killing Serebryakov and utterly undermining the traditional interpretation of the play as an elegy for lost or wasted possibility, particularly in the way the play has been approached in the second half of the twentieth century. (He has done the same with plays by Middleton, Shakespeare and Lessing.) In this radical rewriting Barker explodes the original narrative to explore alternative imaginations, interpretations and narratives beneath the existing narrative, leaving the audience to wrestle with both the original narratives and his reconceptions of them. But ultimately it’s the individual audience member, not Barker, who must sort through the shards left by the explosion and find in them their own significance.

What is one left with, if narrative is decentered in the theatrical experience? Well, one needn’t look to Foreman and Barker, but can look to Hollywood itself. One of the great classics of the American cinema is the 1946 Howard Hawks film The Big Sleep. Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, the Philip Marlowe detective story presents a hopelessly muddled narrative — the kiss of death, one would think, for a genre with such severe conventions as the mystery story; when screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner asked Chandler to clarify the endlessly convoluted plot, even Chandler said that, in the end, it made no sense — it was a bad story, a poor narrative, especially given the genre. But lacking this, what is there left to watch? Well, it turns out, there’s quite a bit: the pleasures of watching and interpreting the relationships between the characters (like Shelley Winters and Lee Grant in The Balcony or Juliana Kelly and T. Ryder Smith in King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe, so Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall); the language; the design. And it repays repeated viewing.

But this is a bit of a digression from my main point, which is that those formal experimentalists who dispense with traditional narrative, in at least some cases, are engaged in the politically and metaphysically radical project of restoring meaning-making authority to the individual spectator rather than imposing that interpretation on an audience-as-collective. When one gives oneself over to or “loses oneself” (in that particularly evocative term) in a narrative, one gives that authority over to another — that is, the storyteller, who always has ideological ends of his own, even if that end is “merely” to entertain (and it never is, the term “entertainment” itself an ideologically-loaded construct): the listener drinks the Kool-aid, in that oft-used term. But that term originated with Jonestown, and drinking the Kool-aid in its original context didn’t mean becoming an automaton or a True Believer: it meant death. In this case, it means the death of the imagination, the suicide of individual agency itself. Aesthetically speaking, there is something profoundly conservative and authoritarian, if not reactionary or paleo-conservative, about this. It is this individual agency that artists like Foreman and Barker intend to restore and celebrate, even if it must be at the cost of allowing the self to be absorbed in a story told over the campfire. They provide encouragement and incentive to find oneself, not to lose oneself, in the theatrical experience.

From the archives: Politics and a critique of tragedy

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In response to Karen Malpede’s essay “On Being a So-Called Political Playwright” which appeared at Howlround on 29 February, I repost the below brief entry, originally published on 3 March 2010.

An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre. Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is: “Write what you know.” All too often, this leads to a paralysis of imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class, the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages. The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger world.

Sarah Kane’s statement “I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That’s why I try to please myself” is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility. It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone, any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member, should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The Culture Industry’s corporations through the media (its music, its newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation (room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer’s conception of the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary American dramatists apparently “know” best.

David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well, rather than being limited to Barker’s individual body of work:

Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre … which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with “theatre.” This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible.

“Raising Hell: Introduction”
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (13-14)
Emphasis my own.

From the archives: Staging the tragic consciousness

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From 2007, below is a post about Howard Barker’s A Style and Its Origins.

Howard Barker. Photo: Victoria Wicks.

Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth, A Style and Its Origins. 119 pages. London: Oberon Books, 2007.

The world has a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima theatre, testifying to the urgency of the creation of contemporary tragedy, in the event a theatregoer wants it: there are the late plays of Samuel Beckett; Richard Foreman’s rather more comic extravaganzas; and there is Howard Barker. The three share a most well-deserved status as complete men of the theatre, poets, designers, and directors alike. But it is perhaps Barker who is most in conscious, unforgiving opposition to the theatre of his time. In his plays, his polemics, his poems, his public pronouncements, and now in the slim volume of memoirs A Style and Its Origins Barker creates and theorizes upon a theatre that has room for the brutal realities of Western geopolitics, understanding (like Foreman, perhaps like Beckett) that the true ability of tragedy is to create an anti-history that valorizes the individual consciousness: that in profoundest sexual ecstasy is a form of individual redemption from the guilt and shame every member of the culture industry feels – and we are all members of that industry now – for being part of the race that perpetrated, within living memory, such grotesque horrors upon itself.

A Style and Its Origins, as pseudo-autobiography (Houth, the putative narrator of the volume, is one of Barker’s many alter-egos) and history of Barker’s own company The Wrestling School, provides an exemplary introduction to Barker’s enormous body of work: over 40 plays, six volumes of poetry, two books of essays; indeed, in its historical and aesthetic breadth and imagination enough to rival the Bard (as Sarah Kane recognised when she called Barker “the Shakespeare of our age”). But what one brings back from a reading of these memoirs is a deep, profound sense of the poet’s necessary isolation, an isolation both voluntary and imposed by the entertainment industry and the contemporary social-realist theatre.

The book is also a history of the experience and ideas that led to the “Theatre of Catastrophe,” as Barker describes it, “a tragic form that dismissed morality from the stage, substituting for it a visceral, instinctive emotional energy.” Barker traces the beginnings of this theatre to his own battle-scarred, urban childhood in the wake of the Second World War (Barker was born in 1946, immediately after the camps were liberated and the bombs dropped on Japan); as he watched his parents negotiate and fail to come to terms with postwar Europe – his father as a working-class Communist, his mother a housewife; he loved them both, and was loved – he began to see through the ameliorative lies of the liberal humanism that was the driving ideology of European reconstruction. “Barker’s father lived the demise of the socialist idea and it injured him, just as his mother suffered the decay of public loyalty to the uncomplicated patriotism that had made soldiers and sailors of her family,” Barker/Houth writes. The schism that the realities of the war introduced into the lives of individual men and women positioned them face-to-face with the guilt they shared in its barbarity (a barbarity, and a guilt, that both Adorno and Celan recognised as well).

When Barker entered the theatre, it was as a satiric social realist, and indeed his first major play, Claw, rehearsed the story of his parents and his own growing sense of the self-realising individual as a transgressor. But laughter did not liberate, either himself or his audience, from the monstrous solitude of the self: instead, Barker embraced that solitude, sensing that in this lay some form of imaginative redemption. The traditional British theatre practice of the mid-twentieth century, even its more radical and progressive offshoots, participated in the totalising force of the culture industry, an industry designed to eradicate memory, complex historical consciousness and therefore responsibility, at the same time massaging the egos of its artists as it pandered to its audiences; in this not only the National Theatre but also smaller companies like the Royal Court and the Joint Stock Company were complicit:

“Barker knew how deeply implicated all men were in their own oppression … he also sensed the poverty of radical theatre, its preposterous claims to educate and the subsequent grotesque simplifications; he thought the theatre was not brave because it feared what might be expressed if the character was truly autonomous; and he watched this moral sclerosis afflict the entire range of its activity … as society became less effectively educated, in invested more and more in educational initiatives so that the theatre was drawn deeper into rackets of social amelioration … funding … posts … careers … Barker often spoke of the Soviet system having found its new home here …

“[Barker] had no desire to educate because he thought the stage a sacred place, too complex in its workings for such mundane projects … the ambitions of the English Stage Company and its priggish child, the Joint Stock Theatre group, seemed to him patronising, condescending, patrician in effect … a schoolroom of moralists …” (pages 85-86; ellipses in original)

In contrast to this, Barker disdains a single meaning and insists on a multiplicity of perspective: anxiety as an avenue to new spectra of understandings.

So much for the origins; what of the style? It is a style which begins in the centering, once again, of the spoken word in theatrical experience, that element of this particular performing art which renders it unique from the others; while movement (central to dance) and non-verbal sound (central to music) are ancillary to this style, it is the spoken word as written by a poet for speaking by an actor which is central to Barker’s tragedy. In discussing actors, Barker/Houth writes, “They responded to his text because they needed to speak, and to speak to the speech’s limits. Because of this profound need in the soul of the actor, Barker loved them …” In essence, he proclaims Artaud dead, long live Artaud: it’s not the tortured body but the tortured word, and more accurately their simultaneous experience, that forms the essence of Barker’s concept of tragedy. Barker’s project is the same in the theatre as Paul Celan’s was on the page (Celan is one of Barker’s favorite poets, along with Apollinaire and Rilke): a recognition of a language which participates in the failed enlightenment project of amelioration; language is the locus of tragedy itself. So it must be splintered, turned against itself, stripped and broken down and reassembled, in this reconstruction revealing a multiplicity of meanings, including, perhaps, a meaning which might provide ecstasy.

In his greatest plays to date (Gertrude – The Cry and Dead Hands), this is specifically a sexual ecstasy as well: language as vehicle for sexual joy, a joy only found in passionate transgression against the taboos of the totalising puritanical culture industry. Barker is aware of the transience, of the momentary nature of the joined orgasm, but it is not its permanence which is meaningful, but its possibility. “Even the most passionate sexual encounters were threatened by the inexorable facts of coercion and decay,” Barker offers. “In his private existence and in his texts he nevertheless affirmed ecstasy as the only riposte to life’s laws, but ecstasy with another, a defiant duality … a perfection of the ‘we’ outside the hounding conformity of the collective” – a collective, a massmind, a hivemind, responsible for the race’s own urge to barbaric self-destruction, laughing and denying their responsibility for that destruction all the way.

Content and style are one: the essentials of human experience are mirrored, in Barker’s theatre, by essentials of sensual experience: grays, not colors; cold steel in productions like his play for a solo female performer, Und. Barker also saves a more expansive style for his costumes, with a nod to 1940s couture, and the high heels which are so prominently a metaphor for sexual being in these plays.

Theodor Adorno is Barker’s favorite philosopher; A Style and Its Origins opens with a quote from Notes to Literature: “Art is a form of knowledge: it expresses through its autonomy what is concealed by the empirical form of reality … Only those thoughts are true which fail to understand themselves.” This is, however, preceded by a poem from Barker’s play The Forty: “I do these things / Oh how I persist I am at least persistent / And I ask / Does anybody want them? / The answer comes back / Nobody at all / So I go on.” One must hear the echo of Beckett’s last sentence of The Unnamable in that last line; and, like Beckett’s effort, Barker’s is essential. A theatre after Auschwitz and Hiroshima not only needs tragedy; tragedy is the only form which can possibly contain them:

“Only a tragic sensibility could discover in loss and the thwarting of dreams a melancholy beauty that kept Barker from despair and at the same time enabled him to claim for the most terrible of his tragedies that they were spiritually necessary – his whole justification for his theatre … for him theatre could never be ambitious enough in the complexity of its themes, its excesses never too great to satisfy the human longing for some sign that pain was not disorder but necessity …”

Barker’s wholesale rejection of social realism includes a rejection, too, of lyrical realism as practiced by Chekhov; indeed, Barker assassinates the Chekhovian theatre in his (Uncle) Vanya, which seeks to reject a puerile resignation exemplified in the loss of dreams to an embrace of pointless “work.” Our theatre, as well as its ideological assumptions, remains dedicated to that false humanism which denies possibility. But one can’t blame poor Chekhov, perhaps, who did not live to see the Russian Revolution or the two defining experiences of the twentieth century, the camp and the bomb.

As Adorno pointed out, mankind’s cruelty to itself did not begin with the 1940s, but as he also pointed out, it is the failure of humanist thought to recognize that the 1940s brought this cruelty to a bright, blunt, technocratic and technological edge. And these continue, of course, finding expression in the kinds of psychological warfare and physiological torture practiced and suffered by Pinter’s characters, also so contemporary, also indebted to technocratic psychiatrists. Here in the United States, we are particularly immune to such realisations, Abu Ghraib to the contrary: indeed, who remembers it now? We continue to participate in the mass forgetting to which the culture industry encourages us: this week, CIA black prisons are on the front page; in a few days from now, it will be Harry Potter. As if all were equal; and all equally transient.

Barker’s brave insistence – that one must turn away from this in order to pursue a truly significant tragedy that can have for our communities the same profound recognition of the human spirit that Jacobean tragedy had for the 1600s or Greek tragedy had for the classical age – is extraordinarily courageous; it moves him and his theatre to the margins, where, perhaps, he is destined to practice his art. But Barker’s never cared for large audiences. One of the key elements, one of the key words of A Style and Its Origins, as indeed in his theatre itself, is “faith”: a faith that the work is necessary, a faith seated in the bodily sublime product of its experience.

It is hard to keep that faith in the evidence of the poet’s exile from his community, from his self: a time in the Nietzschean wilderness. But there are signs that the effort isn’t, after all, for naught (though one can be satisfied with that); if critic Charles Lamb finds a performative basis for Barker’s theatre in Baudrillard’s theory of sexual seduction, a philosophical basis might be found in Bataille’s theory of sexual transgression and death, Bataille a thinker whose sympathy to those who also accept Adorno’s conclusions is growing. Some recent academic work is reaching back to Kant and Schopenhauer, bypassing Hegel’s Absolute, in search of a hidden basis and tradition for Adorno’s and Bataille’s thought. And this work is finding that basis and tradition there.

In A Style and Its Origins, Barker – a surprisingly generous man not without the means of self-effacement, at least as he presents himself in this book; the rumors as to his lifestyle (that he lives in a modest house; that he is afraid of flying; that he can be the essence of British cultivated politeness when need be) seem justifiable based on this memoir – gives credit to many supporters of his work, including well-deserved thanks to critics like Lamb, David Ian Rabey and Karoline Gritzner. Indeed, Barker may be best known here through these critics and the academic books devoted to his work. When his plays are produced in the U.S., they tend to be those of his early period like No End of Blame and Scenes from an Execution (both of these now more than two decades old), rather than his more radical later work. We can hope that the publication stateside of A Style and Its Origins in September will encourage theatre artists to take up his more recent plays. In this way actors may find themselves free to reach the outer limits of their abilities again, and poets encouraged (as I am) by Barker’s own fearless exploitation of his own catastrophically ambivalent but potentially liberating language and humanity.