Barker: Plays Five

Howard Barker

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781840028867
• eBook ISBN: 9781849432689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Includes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the Face Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. Both The Last Supper and Seven Lears exemplify Barker's way with great religious and literary stories, the first placing the willful suicide of a Christ-like prophet, Lvov, in the context of modern chaos, illuminating his moral ambiguities with comic or painful parables, the second taking its inspiration from the significant absence in Shakespeare's play, that of Lear's wife, the queen whose murder is here discerned as the origin as the great family tragedy. The execution of the Russian royal family remains shrouded in mystery - not least that of the identity of two bodies discovered in the mass grave years after the event. In Hated Nightfall Barker's speculative imagination leads him to identify these as the children's tutor, Dancer, and a recalcitrant servant, Jane. Dancer is perhaps Barker's archetypal hero, febrile, iconoclastic, yet in search of a self-sacrifice nothing appears to justify. In Wounds to the Face, our complex and sometimes violent relations with our own physiognomy form the psychological link between related scenes of wounding, notoriety, shame and vanity in a play of kaleidoscopic energy and imagery.

THE LAST SUPPER

Characters

LVOV
A Thinker

MARYA
A Nurse

ARNOLD
A Salesman

IVORY
An Aristocrat

SUSANNAH
A Cook

SLOMAN
A Carpenter

JUDITH
A Widow

GISELA
A Diaryist

DORA
A Teacher

ANNA
A Prostitute

FORJACKS
A Scholar

APOLLO
A Poet

ELLA
A Student

FIRST OFFICER

SECOND OFFICER

FARMER

THE ACTORS OF THE PARABLES

MacATTLEE
McSTAIN
McNOY
Soldiers

LITTLE MONK

ABBOTT

A FEMALE CHILD

A WIDOW

VIOLINIST

NUN

WOMAN LOOTER

MALE DOCTOR

A CHILD

A WOMAN

A GUNNER

A SEAMSTRESS

THE CHORUS

THE FIRST PROLOGUE

ELLA: We found God after all

Thinking He had disappeared

DORA: He had not disappeared

We found Him after all

Like the vagrant under the wall

He was only out of sight

ELLA: And He stood up in the light

Of all our shame and said

In the beam of our shame

Rubbed His eyes and said

DORA: I am not dead

I am the Public

ELLA: To me the heretics will

DORA: I am not dead

I am the Public

ELLA: And the transgressors

DORA: Genuflect

ELLA: The incurably deviant

DORA: Adore

ELLA: The breakers of vows

DORA: Applaud

ELLA: The habitually glum

DORA/ELLA: LAUGH YOU BASTARD, THIS IS MY CREATION, LAUGH.

DORA: Did you think I’d died with religion?

Did you think I would succumb?

I have endured worse winters

Under the arches entertained the louse

ELLA: Quitting the cathedral in the night

DORA: God the Public needs no house

ELLA: And the sexually active bishops

DORA: The theologians with radio technique

ELLA: The fathers of gifted children

DORA: The rock musicians with castles

ELLA: The summer school students in states of undress

DORA: The carnival organizers

ELLA: The sweet-natured pickpockets

DORA: Shop stewards red-eyed in the billiard hall

ELLA: Popes and Mercenaries all

DORA: Concurred

ELLA: The Public We

The Public We

The Public Had to be God

DORA: Since God had to be

DORA/ELLA: APPLAUD YOU BASTARDS!

(The terrible sound of laughter.)

THE SECOND PROLOGUE

IVORY: I bring you an invitation

Oh, no, she says, not an invitation

Yes

We are all so afraid

Yes

An invitation to hang up the

SUFFOCATING OVERCOAT OF COMMUNICATION

Hang it up

And those with biros write upon your wrist

THE PLAY CONTAINS NO INFORMATION

Aren’t you tired of journalists?

Oh, aren’t you tired of journalists?

No one will hold your hand tonight

Nor oil you with humour

As the swimmer is greased to pass through

Water quicker

No

When the poem became easy it also became poor

When art became mechanized it became an addiction

I lecture!

Oh, I lecture you!

(A terrible storm of laughter.)

Forgive!

Forgive!

THE PLAY

A FIGURE asleep in a hammock. An engine labouring. A WOMAN enters.

MARYA: I’m still insane.

Obviously insane as ever.

(The train passes.)

Goodbye you male scum! Goodbye you meat and gristle! (She bares her breasts. A MAN enters, watches her. The wheels fade.)

ARNOLD: You shout at all the trains. You smear your breasts on all the windows. Goodbye you male scum! But how dedicated you are at the hospitals. Meeting the ambulances and wiping the broken bodies. Now, this is his influence. Isn’t it? Your influence?

(The FIGURE is still.)

Pretend to be asleep. But I say it’s your influence. YOU HAVE NO DESIRE TO CURE ANYBODY. Sleep on, sleep on.

(IVORY enters.)

Cunt!

IVORY: Let him sleep.

ARNOLD: Sleep? How can anyone sleep in the current state of things? We can only pretend, just as he is now pretending. He is fictive, aren’t you? Fictive!

IVORY: We know he is fictive.

ARNOLD: We know it, but does he? Sleep is for times of stability. Even gardening has become impossible. Why do you say?

IVORY: No, I didn’t say.

ARNOLD: Because it is absurd to plant what will never be allowed to nourish. I know you say plant anyway. Plant, and if it is trodden down, plant again. I have heard him say that.

MARYA: Plant, and even though armies trample fifty gardens one they w...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Last Supper
• Seven Lears
• Hated Nightfall
• Wounds to the Face