Arguments for a Theatre

(4th edition)

Howard Barker

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783198054
• eBook ISBN: 9781783198047
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new edition of Barker's seminal text Arguments for a Theatre outlinesthe theory and practice of his 'Theatre of Catastrophe'. Author of over thirty plays, Howard Barker has long been an implacable foe of the liberal British establishment, and champion of radical theatre world-wide. His best-known plays are The Castle, Scenes from an Execution and The Possibilities. All his plays are emotionally highly charged, intellectually stimulating and have no truck with the theatrical conventions of what he terms the 'Establishment Theatre'. These fragments, essays, thoughts and poems on the nature of theatre likewise reject the constraints of 'objective' academic theatre criticism. Rather they explore the collision (and collusion) of intellect and artistry in the creative act. This book is more than a collection of essays: it is a cultural manifesto.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Forty-nine asides for a tragic theatre
• Ye gotta laugh
• Conversation with a dead poet
• On language in drama
• Radical elitism in the theatre
• Notes to The Bite of the Night
• Honouring the audience
• The politics beyond the politics
• The consolations of catastrophe
• Beauty and terror in the Theatre of Catastrophe
• Juha Malmivaara’s Scenes from an Execution, Turku, Finland, 1988
• On Nigel Terry’s performance of Savage, in The Bite of the Night
• On watching a performance by life prisoners
• The offer, the reward, and the need to disappoint
• The audience, the soul, and the stage
• The humanist theatre
• The catastrophic theatre
• Theatre without a conscience
• The deconsecration of meaning in the Theatre of Catastrophe
• The cult of accessibility and the Theatre of Obscurity
• A bargain with impossibility: the theatre of moral speculation in an age of accord
• Recognition as aesthetic paralysis in theatre
• The theatre lies under a shroud
• The state of loss as the end of a dramatic performance
• Two Bradshaws
• The idea of promiscuity in the Theatre of Catastrophe
• On the sickness of the audience
• Eleven building bricks
• Stages in the alteration of an audience
• The relations between an affronted audience and the actor
• The anatomy of a sob
• The development of a theory of beauty for the stage
• Towards a theory of production
• Barely concealed irritation – a critical encounter
• On plethora
• Goya’s grin
• Ignorance and instinct in the Theatre of Catastrophe
• Why I am no playwright
• Murders and conversations: the classic text and a contemporary writer
• What’s new …?
• Dog on stage
• The glass confessional: the theatre in hyper-democratic society
• Disputing Vanya
• Love in the museum: the modern author and the antique text
• Creating a death
• The house of infection: theatre in the age of social hygiene
• The Play of Seven Days
• Twelve Propositions Already in Decay
• A Preface
• Saying it all: The Politics of Speech in Late Democracy
• The Ethics of Relevance and The Triumph of the Literal
• Theatre’s Sordid Marriages
• On Naturalism and its Pretensions
• The Spoken Body and The Utopian Regard
• The Sunless Garden of The Unconsoled
• Identifying Some Platitudes with Regard to the Plethoric Text
• The Ensemble Gets Ill …
• Afterwords: beckoning beyond reach … by David Ian Rabey
• Endnotes