Death, The One and the Art of Theatre

Howard Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134270798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Death, The One and the Art of Theatre is the latest collection of Barkers distinctive and revelatory philosophical musings on theatre. It is a stunning array of speculations, deductions, prose poems and poetic aperçus that casts a unique and unflinching light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, love and theatre. Exploring the juncture between aesthetics and metaphysics, the book looks at the human experience of love and death as life at its most intrinsically theatrical.

Howard Barker is an internationally renowned playwright whose works are regularly produced throughout Europe and the US. He is widely known for his controversial explorations into contemporary tragedy and his anti-Brechtian focus on the irrational and the catastrophic. He is often credited as a major influence on the generation of playwrights that includes Sarah Kane.

Death, The One and the Art of the Theatre is a profoundly unsettling and inspiring piece of writing and extends the challenge to orthodox morality that Barker first presented in Arguments for a Theatre, a challenge he describes as men and womens secret longing for the incomprehensible nature of pain.

I do not know the theatre, and the theatre does not know me.

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There is the theatre and there is the art of theatre. All that is proposed in this book pertains to the latter.

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Some have had to do with the art of theatre, but finding it too arduous, chose to join the theatre. These are legion. A few remained faithful. Very few, because it is a painful path.

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The theatre purports to give pleasure to the many. The art of theatre lends anxiety to the few. Which is the greater gift?

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Nothing said about death by the living can possibly relate to death as it will be experienced by the dying. Nothing known about death by the dead can be communicated to the living. Over this appalling chasm tragedy throws a frail bridge of imagination.

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Since theatre ceased to make death its subject it surrendered its authority over the human soul. Since it allowed itself to be incorporated into mundane projects of political indoctrination and social therapy it abdicated its power. Always theatre is suborned by the idealism of its makers. Always it is traduced by the sentimental. In the art of theatre we pity the idealist as one pities the man with a fatal disease. This pity is strictly circumscribed.Whilst many have tried to make hospitals from theatres we keep our stage infection-free.

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All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not the subject.

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One has heard talk of many theatres existing, and of many forms, as if theatres tolerated one another. The fact is that theatres annihilate one another as all religions annihilate one another. Is this because theatre is a religion? Let us confess, the art of theatre has many of the characteristics of religion. For example, it finds so much theatre anathema. It excommunicates. Its methods are akin to prayer. What distinguishes it from all religion is this, however: that it recoils from truth. It repudiates truth as vulgarity.

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All cultures are enslaved by idealism – they are defined by their servitude to the ideal. Only tragedy locates the ideal in death, but because death is the first enemy of political systems, tragedy is caricatured as negativity.The bravery of tragedy – where not even sexual love is sufficient to abolish the fascination of death – lies in its refutation of pleasure as an organizing principle of existence. Who would deny that this contempt for pleasure is also an ecstasy?

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The theatre is often contrasted with the street, as if it were false, and the street real. The art of theatre asserts its absolute independence of the street. It values the door. It values the wall. It leaves the street to the street. In any case, who says the street is real? It pretends to be real. The fact so many persist in the fiction that it is real is of no concern to us.

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Silence is the consequence of too-deep knowledge in some, of ignorance in others.

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The dread of speech is a sign of spiritual health, for the banality of speech is universal and induces nausea. In the art of theatre we acknowledge a solitary obligation – to save speech from itself.

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To tell the truth sincerely is the pitiful pretension of the theatre. To lie sincerely is the euphoria of the art of theatre.

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To ask for truth in theatre is contradictory, a repudiation of its essence. Consequently, death, a subject for which true statements are, a priori, inadmissible, is the subject most perfectly suited to the form of theatre.

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We are not born full of sin, we are born full of the appetite for it.

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We repudiate all those who find theatre congenial. The art of theatre is constructed on the premiss that the creation of happiness is no part of its function. Nor does it have a function.

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To seduce this woman and not another. To seduce this man and not another. We are faintly discriminating.

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To move continually out of reach. To be only ever proximate.

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I come close. I tell everything. But only in such a way that the listener wonders if what he heard was imagined.

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Confession is also discretion. ‘Why did I fail to include the fact that I . . . ? ’

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To seduce this woman and not another. To seduce this man and not another. The influence of the locality. The charm of coincidence. The failure to exploit (the dropped handkerchief, the entire store of stratagems). The seducer’s nausea at his own propositions. The prospect of having to admit nothing turned out as planned.

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When the light came on, he saw her face was disfigured.This had the effect of extinguishing his desire. He found an excuse to avoid the consequences of what he himself had initiated. His actions were, however, dictated by consideration of a purely public kind. It was not in his sexuality that he experienced offence. On the contrary, he sensed his erotic instinct was enhanced by her disfigurement (‘what or who had so damaged her? How had she inspired such mistreatment?’). Once he was able to acknowledge this he accepted the challenge of her condition. He nevertheless stipulated she wore tighter clothes.

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All I describe is theatre even where theatre is not the subject.

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So essential is theatre to the idea of life it cannot be compromised by making itself the imitation of life. It cannot be humiliated by rituals of reproduction.

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The theatre reproduces life. The art of theatre invents life. This act of invention may be perceived as a critique of the poverty of existence. It is not social criticism.

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The art of theatre, in its impatience with the world, utters in its own languages. Moreover, it understands these languages to be the means by which its public is cleansed of the detritus of familiarity, domesticity and recognition.

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The art of theatre was fear-inspiring. The Humanists, who know of no use for fear, nor can imagine the sublimity of fear, abolished it from the stage. We talk, however, of theatre as crucially an art of death. We assert the dominance of fear in the life of the characters. In this we are, paradoxically, realists.

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Death is the preoccupation of great art even where it is not the subject of it. When the utilitarians seized the theatre death simply stood in the foyer, as patient as a chauffeur.

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To enter the space silently. To enter it thinking of death. To make death the whole subject even when laughter discloses the ambiguity of our passions. To admit death.

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To admit death . . . to know now what you knew but were denied consciousness of . . . that all is predicated on death . . . is this political?

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What is the function of laughter in tragedy? Can we talk of a function in tragedy? Let us put it another way: how does laughter serve the experience of tragedy? By implicating us in its seductive process. It is a dropped handkerchief.

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The peculiar laugh of tragedy. The laugh on the rim of death.

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The dropped handkerchief: accident/intention /the beauty of a falling thing/white is a sign/I surrender / intimate as underwear/to retrieve it is to begin/ impossible not to retrieve it/an obligation/excuse me/we both know/this will perhaps be fatal.

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The foyer is not neutral. Always the play of death is at war with the foyer. The foyer is the theatre par excellence. It is the first aim of the art of theatre to abolish the foyer.

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Cruelty is cheap, like philanthropy.

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We should all like to choose our deaths, both the moment and the manner. We should like to control this as all the episodes of life. But death is not an episode of life, it is beyond life and nothing that pertains to life pertains to death. It was the same with the birth agony. We were coming into a place. With death we are going into a place. Or, if we are not going into a place, certainly we are leaving one . . .

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The sexual moment is not a knowing. Its vitality is nevertheless inspired by the misapprehension that it is a k...