Howard Barker's art of theatre

Essays on his plays, poetry and production work

David Rabey, Sarah Goldingay, David I Rabey, Sarah Goldingay

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526106926
  9780719089299
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526111227
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism

Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial and provocative multi-media artist. Beyond his internationally performed and acclaimed theatrical productions, and his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, he is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist cognisant of the unique power of art to provoke moral speculation, and of the distinctive theatricality of the human being in times of crisis.

This collection of essays provides international perspectives on the full range of Barker's achievements, theatrical and otherwise, and argues for their unique importance and urgency at the forefront of several genres of provocative modern art. It includes an interview with the artist and an essay by Barker himself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and references
• 1 Introduction: the ultimate matter of style
• 2 Performance within performance: Howard Barker and the acted life – some thoughts
• 3 Unearthly powers of invention: speech, report and repetition in recent Wrestling School productions
• 4 Reinventing ‘grand narratives’: Barker’s challenge to postmodernism
• 5 Institutions, icons and the body in Barker’s plays, 1977–86
• 6 Access to the body: the theatre of revelation in Beckett, Foreman and Barker
• 7 ‘Not nude but naked’: nakedness and nudity in Barker’s drama
• 8 Places of punishment: surveillance, reason and desire in the plays of Howard Barker
• 9 Barker, criticism and the philosophy of the ‘Art of Theatre’
• 10 Staging Barker in France 2009
• 11 21 for 21: a breakthrough moment in international theatre-making?
• 12 I Saw Myself: artist and critic meet in the mirror
• 13. ‘His niece or his sister’: genealogical uncertainties and literary filiation in Barker’s Gertrude – The Cry
• 14 History in the age of fracture: catastrophic time in Barker’s The Bite of the Night
• 15 The Dying of Today and the meta-stases of language: from history to tale to play to mise-en-scène
• 16 ‘The substrata of experience’: Barker’s poetry, 1988–2008
• 17 Reading Howard Barker’s pictorial art
• 18 Howard Barker’s paintings, poems and plays: ‘in the deed itself’, or the triple excavation of the unchangeable
• 19 Memories of paintings in Howard Barker’s theatre
• 20 The sunless garden of the unconsoled: some destinations beyond catastrophe
• 21 Howard Barker in dialogue with David Ian Rabey, City University, New York, 10 May 2010
• Appendix: Howard Barker: chronology and further reading
• Index