Category Archives: European drama

Howard Barker at the National Theatre

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Fiona Shaw.

In A Style and Its Origins (2007), Howard Barker’s alter-ego Eduardo Houth wrote of Barker’s playful attitude towards the UK’s National Theatre:

Barker had amused himself by notoriously sending the National Theatre all his plays for a certain period… and he would not have refused their performance if offers had been made, for he was not averse to a range of styles of playing his texts being put before a public even if he thought those styles less potent than his own…[1]

An offer has been made. In a 26 April 2012 interview for The Derry Journal, Irish actress Fiona Shaw let slip that the National Theatre will produce Barker’s mid-1980s Scenes from an Execution this coming fall. Shaw joins a stellar list of actresses, including Glenda Jackson, Juliet Stevenson, and Jan Maxwell, who have tackled the role of Galactia — perhaps one of the great female roles of the 20th century English-language theatre. It will be the first production of a Howard Barker play at the National.

No further details on director, design team, or cast; these will follow when announced.

Footnotes
  1. Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth, A Style and Its Origins. London: Oberon Books, 2007, pp 62-63. [↩]

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. [↩]

Friday video: The Caretaker

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Jonathan Pryce as Davies in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.

On 3 May, Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker opens at BAM for a run through 17 June, in a  Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse/Theatre Royal Bath production directed by Christopher Morahan and featuring Jonathan Pryce as Davies. While surely Davies is at the center of the play, Pinter’s 1960 classic also features one of his first extraordinary monologues, Aston’s description of the shock treatments that left him disconnected from his environment and himself, which provides the Act Two curtain. At BAM, Aston will be played by the fine Alan Cox (his threatening younger brother Mick by Alex Hassell); Cox performs this monologue in the Youtube video below.

From the archives: Samuel Beckett: Fuck life

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Originally posted on 7 April 2010.

In Beckett’s late play Rockaby, a prematurely old woman rocks herself off from one world and into another; passing judgment on her experience in this one, she says, “rock her off / stop her eyes / fuck life / stop her eyes / rock her off / rock her off.” This unconditional repudiation of existence may not necessarily reflect Beckett’s own perspective, but it is part and parcel of Beckett’s compassion that he allows her a day in the sun, or at least in the spotlight; it is not sugar-coated with comedy, but a repudiation precise and spare.

In his recent short biography of the writer, Samuel Beckett, Andrew Gibson makes the essential attempt to restore to the dramatist and his characters the difficult and thankless nobility of the compassionate view. Coming nearly fifteen years after the monumental biographies by Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, Gibson’s 200-page monograph seeks to offer something of a corrective to the academic and cultural hagiography of the writer. “It is impossible to ignore this self-deprecating, reticent, disciplined, conscientious, diligent, implacably well-mannered, dauntingly forbearing person, not least because he appears to have been the origin of the myth of ‘Saint Sam’ amongst a generation of scholars who made his acquaintance,” Gibson writes (and bearing in mind the emphasis on the comedy, not the tragedy, that these scholars found in his work: The subtitle of Ruby Cohn’s first book on Beckett was “The Comic Gamut,” and Hugh Kenner included him in a study entitled The Stoic Comedians). “Look straight at the works themselves,” he continues, “and there is a great deal of material that — even insisting on the detachment of writer from narrator or character — simply does not square with the myth at all: the superciliousness and arrogance perceptible in the early writings, for example; the hysterical rage of the Trilogy; the extreme and sometimes murderous forms of violence from Molloy to All That Fall to How It Is and beyond.”

Gibson performs this rescue by balancing Beckett’s work between what he calls melancholia (“the conviction that there is ‘nothing to be done’”) and misericordia (which “assumes that one cannot remain indifferent to the plight of others astray in the labyrinth”). He emphasises that this corrective is not meant to undermine Beckett’s clear caritas — “goodness to others” — but to establish the difficulty of maintaining that compassion in a twentieth-century historical culture which encourages quite the opposite. In the eight chapters of his biography, Gibson traces this historical culture and Beckett’s response to it in Ireland of the 1920s, Europe of the 1930s (Gibson is very good on the viciousness of fascist governments in suppressing and demonizing Modernism), postwar France, and the more international globalized culture of the Cold War and after. In doing so, Gibson draws upon recent revisionist histories of Vichy France (in which Beckett’s career with the resistance formed the background to the great trilogy of novels), Mark Nixon’s fine examination of Beckett’s German diaries (which were discovered posthumously) over the past ten years or so, and the views of Foucault, Badiou and Adorno towards Beckett’s work in an administered society.

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Gibson is at his best in discussing the late works (especially Stirrings Still) that until recently hid in the shadows of those like Waiting for Godot and the trilogy that have gained iconic status in the culture; it is a status which Beckett himself sought to resist, at least to himself in this culture of consumption and celebrity. “It is hard to imagine references to the culture of consumption in Ohio Impromptu,” he says, continuing:

Even as Beckett settles for the world of advanced capital as where he “happens to be,” however minimally, whatever the moments of collusion, he also holds open another space for thought to those that characterized the dominant ideologies of his era. … Beckett is scrupulous, almost beyond comparison, in his repudiation of suspect positivities. He is adamantine in his refusal to conspire “with all extant meanness and finally with the destructive principle” (to quote Adorno). He therefore chooses a via negativa. If “the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be,” then that task is supremely exemplified in Beckett. … Beckett will not surrender the idea of another sphere or possibility of value, however apparently absurd or purely negative its form. This negative space is the space of art; or rather, Beckett takes the preservation of the negative space to be integral to art’s task.

It is not the place of art to either provide hope or deny its provision; whether it does one or the other remains a perspective of the audience member or reader, not the artist, as a litmus test of his or her own worldview. But, as Gibson insists, it is necessary to refrain from imposing our own perspective — our own hope or hopelessness — upon a body of work of such a stringent and deliberately oppositional a writer as Beckett. In refraining from it, we give both the memory of the man and the presence of his work the respect it deserves. And in doing so this approach preserves all three of the qualities — melancholia, misericordia and caritas — that the work exhibits.

Below, the second half of Billie Whitelaw’s performance of Rockaby, directed by Alan Schneider: