A Style and Its Origins

Howard Barker

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781849433006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Britisches Drama

Howard Barker's alter-ego Eduardo Houth first materialised as the photographer of publicity images for Barker's theatre company The Wrestling School, one of many fictional identities assumed by the playwright to screen a range of his activities, including set and costume design. Writing of himself in the third person and in the historic tense, Barker/Houth achieves a fluency and an uncommon measure of objectivity, though objectivity is scarcely the sole intention. The result is a unique exercise in self-description, partisan but without the shrill self-justification so common in a mere autobiography. Barker/Houth's A Style and its Origins is very much a literary creation; it is also a totally original document and a rich history of the dramatist and his aesthetic.

I

BEGINNING  WITH  THE  WHITE  SHEET…

The women of his family had been laundresses and his mother wanted to wash…

She pegged great sheets on lines and the sheets cracked in the breeze…

She sang songs from the war as she carried the basket on her hip her labour was pleasure she laughed at the wind and showed her teeth…

Barker wanted to film the simple scene as every artist in his maturity discovers this need to know what made him, the long-awaited moment when memory and the possibility of art at last collide, a perfection but a brevity before nostalgia sets in and rots integrity…

In his play He Stumbled Barker directed the actors in a scene with a washing-line and a laundry basket… he wanted the action of pegging out washing to be continuous, an element of the seduction that followed from the intimacy of this domestic activity. He wanted it to begin with the sheet, wet and heavy from the wash. He asked the actors to find the ends and to pull the sheet between them with short, co-ordinated movements to cause the creases to fall out before it could be suspended from the line. Neither actor recognised or understood this routine, known and natural to Barker from his infancy, and when they learned it mechanically it did not satisfy him. He insisted on the rhythm that came from familiarity. When they had achieved this, and only then, the actors began to laugh foolishly and frequently dropped the sheet or pulled it from one another's hands. Barker knew they had fulfilled the obligation of the moment, for whilst he insisted they should not drop the sheet, he knew from his childhood that both he and his mother giggled helplessly on nearly every occasion they carried out this operation, it was intrinsic to it and a crucial element of the seduction…

In The Castle Stucley finds sinister presentiments of approaching disaster in the state of his linen

I sleep alone in sheets grey with tossing, I cannot keep a white sheet white, do you find this? Grey by the morning. The launderers are frantic.

The rectangle of pristine white, the bedsheet or the starched tablecloth, features routinely in his painting and in his plays… Tenna scattering the knives and forks so meticulously polished by the palace servant in Animals In Paradise and replacing the cutlery with her own body… the dazzling shroud of Dead Hands, a literal whitening of a dark secret… the tablecloth laid with infinite care by Photo, the blind protagonist of The Fence In Its Thousandth Year, as he picnics beside barbed wire, innocence neighbouring cruelty…

Barker talked of ‘the shock of cleanliness’ on the stage… the white sheet has for him a perverse value, like the white bridal costume which demands to be desecrated in his rewritten Women Beware Women, or the dazzling white gown which is fouled in Und… in his painting the white forms of suspended or draped sheets act as an immaculate commentary on the sordid facts of the social world… the naked patronne relaxes in her empty café among a maze of tablecloths in La Patronne At 1 a.m.… like tents white shapes surround the Dead Russian Soldier By The Yalu River or hang from lines in rows in The Threadbare Flags Of Surrender, and in the self-portrait with Victoria Wicks We Fail To Sell Ourselves Even the figures pose before white canvasses slung from a shop front…

Barker wrote on paper, never on the electronic screen, and affirmed his love of the paper sheet by only ever using the larger obsolescent kind known as foolscap, long abolished by the manufacturers… they searched for this paper… a unique supply was discovered in a rural place…

And on this sheet of white, the ordering of the speeches so peculiar to Barker, the lines separated according to their rhythms of

Word

Placed

Under

Word

to indicate the burden of pain with which each syllable is to be uttered, a discipline bewildering to actors until they spoke and then self-evident. In this as in so much with Barker's texts things lucid only with the act of articulation…

2

BARKER  SPOKE  OF  HIS  CHILDHOOD but mostly as sound… with the fall of darkness deep-breathing locomotives slipping on the incline from their too-heavy freights…the trucks elbowing one another as they clattered back… over it the screaming of out-late girls… under it the boy-shouts… with dawn the plaintive convent bell disputing with the factory hooters calling women workers to the assembly line… it was profoundly urban yet from his window he saw ancient trees… his family had been rehoused as a consequence of overcrowding and their asbestos prefab stood on a park… the park had been pasture in another century… where they lived in tight proximity is grass again… Barker called his poems excavations and thought of London not as wide but deep… his sense of the dispersal of all things runs through his work… accumulations both spiritual and material cannot resist decay… in an early play situated on the cemeteries of the Great War the iconoclastic Lalage says of the unborn generations

They will forget. They will eat sandwiches here and bring their dogs to shit

(The Love Of A Good Man)

And the witch Skinner envisions the casual ignorance of the future as it treads over the sacred sites of the past, the scene of her own ordeal, and the dreadful edifice which initiated it, all subject to the law of oblivion

This floor, laid over flowers we once lay on, this cruel floor will become the site of giggling picnics, clots of children wandering with music in their ears and not one will think, not one, A WOMAN WRITHED HERE ONCE.

(The Castle)

Barker's family exerted on him a simultaneous anxiety and rage… nature was threatening, society a conspiracy of thieves… if his mother described the first out of a suffocating love, his father articulated the second from an impassioned communism learned in the war and exercised on the factory floor… neither spared him love… he called his father a beautiful man and heard him always calling in his sons

It was heard

And it was kind the paternal voice

Softened by the kitchen's sweltering

Boy come in:

So out of the gloved dark he walked

Humped with secrecy

His thin bones marrowed with small crime

Barker's father lived the demise of the socialist idea and it injured him, just as his mother suffered the decay of public loyalty to the uncomplicated patriotism that had made soldiers and sailors of her family… their quarrels had been the constant antiphony to Barker's infant years, a grinding more pitiful than cruel, and he ached for them…

Now let me rest my ancestors

The light bones the hair clouds

The brittle shaft of an idea

Whose iron head fell from its

Reiterations

A dense body of his early plays describes the dying of the socialist ethic – so hard a weapon, so liable to rust – and in the end he could no longer participate in the elaboration of the progressive theory that underlay so much of the European theatre of his time – his repudiation of it was visceral, but in theatre he articulated its irrelevance, its negativity, even its morbidity in theoretical texts like Arguments and Death, The One… he called all the arts of morality timid, conformist and made from a substance he thought poisonous in both life and art – shame… much later he was able to write, from a profound despair

There is need for terrible dying and of grief

For the many dead

That the coming through might learn silence

And stare at their bread for minutes on end

Observing his timidity as a child and apprehensive for him, Barker's mother urged him to learn the arts of sociability, to become ‘one of the boys’… primitively she knew the power of the male collective, but he preferred the company of women young and old… when Barker fell into the theatre – a place where the collective of the boys never ceases to wield a dominant authority – she tried to buy his first play from him to keep it from being staged…

As a child he heard her sexual cries through the cardboard wall… his bed lay against it and in the darkness he fretted that she was ill or dreaming terrible dreams… why did his father not comfort her…? Always the contradiction wounded him… later the woman's cry became for him a thing of infinite significance as it is for all men more or less… and the philosophical basis for his greatest play…

He carried his father's ashes through the streets where he had spent his life…

After the death of his mother he never visited South London again…

3

BARKER DID NOT INVENT The Wrestling School but he gave it its name… in this name lay intuitions both personal and public… for him theatre was a place of struggle and of domination, as the playground is a place of fear and noise… he knew his plays were called difficult and called them so himself, arguing that difficulty was a price to pay if not for enlightenment – which he cared nothing for – then for spiritual experience… and he knew much of this perceived difficulty arose simply because his plays did not obey the rules of the dominant aesthetic… they observed other rules… his own… the name was suggestive also of those secret societies which during the Fascist period had concealed themselves under innocuous names and Barker thought of his theatre as a secret… the more so as the age became obsessively transparent and threatened to eliminate the private sphere…

Kenny Ireland, an actor and a man of discernment who concealed his pity under a volatile foam of conviviality and violence – a character therefore profoundly sympathetic to Barker – came to Barker's home on a summer's afternoon with Hugh Fraser, another actor familiar with his work, both men discontents… They perched in Barker's small, high study and asked him for a play. Both of them had seen Barker's conversion of Middleton's Jacobean classic Women Beware Women and wanted a similar violation perpetrated on Chekhov… Barker felt an antipathy for Chekhov which later materialised in his (Uncle) Vanya but at this time he wanted only to write original plays and suggested a new work about the death of Christ. The actors trusted his instinct… the play became The Last Supper…

There was an infectious spirit of ambition… whilst they talked of the one play Barker already thought of it as only the first… he asked about buildings… seasons of work… prolific as he was he thought it necessary to keep up a stream of productions in order to familiarise the public with the different values they embodied… Ireland was patient, sharing his pleasure but a realist first and pragmatic… he had directed Barker's Power Of The Dog for the Joint Stock Theatre group, a theatre company Barker disdained, thinking its passion for relevance pitiful and vain. The same group had mounted his Victory after it had languished at the Royal Court, ignored. In both cases, the production of an existing text was expedient. The Joint Stock Theatre group's existence was predicated on a working method which dispensed with the writer as the imaginative source and invested instead in research and workshop. The failure of a project obliged them to reach for an existing text. Ireland had played the furious cavalier in Victory, Fraser the Soviet NKVD officer in The Power Of The Dog… furthermore, both had played Barker in their period with the RSC and both shared a perception that his plays had never yet been properly seen… that there was a way w...