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Our Honorary Professor
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ELISABETH ANGEL-PEREZ is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). She is a specialist in contemporary English theatre and drama. Her most recent publications include a book on post-traumatic theatre (Voyages au bout du possible: les théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel Beckett a Sarah Kane, Klincksieck, 2006) and a collective opus about Howard Barker’s theatre (Howard Barker et le Théâtre de la Catastrophe, Editions Thé âtrales, 2006). She has also collaborated and coordinated the translation of Arguments for a Theatre (Arguments pour le theatre, Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2006) and translated several plays by Howard Barker, Martin Crimp and Caryl Churchill.

MARY KAREN DAHL is a Professor of Theatre at Florida State University. She has a longstanding interest in the relationship between performance and politics. Her book Political Violence in Drama: Classical Models, Contemporary Variations was selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Related essays include ‘Postcolonial British Theatre: Black Voices at the Center’ in Imperialism and Drama for Routledge; ‘Stage Violence as Thaumaturgic Technique’ in Violence in Drama for Cambridge University Press; and ‘State Terror and Dramatic Countermeasures’ in Politics and Terror in Modern Drama for Edinburgh University Press. Her current work poses questions about political theory and citizenship and includes essays on media and theatrical treatments of contemporary events such as the case of Stephen Lawrence and the Behzti affair.

KAROLINE GRITZNER is a Lecturer in Drama in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her research interests include contemporary British and Irish theatre; modern European drama; theatre, gender and critical theory; and the philosophy and aesthetic theory of Theodor W Adorno in relation to theatre and the arts. She is currently working on a monograph on contemporary British Theatre in the context of Adorno’s aesthetic theory (for Edward Mellen Press).

HELEN IBALL is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull. Her interests in contemporary theatre and live art, identity politics, and performance aesthetics, are reflected in her contribution to Casting Gender: Women and Performance in Intercultural Contexts (Peter Lang, 2005). Her essays have appeared in the journal Performance Research in special editions ‘On food’ and ‘on archiving’. Helen has published on the work of Sarah Kane in Contemporary Theatre Review, and is completing a monograph on Kane’s play Blasted (Continuum, 2007). She is currently engaged in research for a study of British theatre and theatricality, 1990s – present.

CHRISTINE KIEHL teaches English Literature and Drama at the University of Lyon 2. She has assisted various drama productions for Lyon-based companies. She writes articles on contemporary English drama and more exclusively on Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe. She participated in the Wrestling with Barker Summer School (July 2003) and in the international colloquium on Howard Barker held in Paris-Nanterre (January 2004). Her PhD thesis (December 2005) is entitled ‘Le Corps dans le théâtre de la catastrophe de Howard Barker’.

CHARLES LAMB is Head of Performing Arts at Bournemouth and Poole College. Born in 1947, he studied literature and drama at the Universities of Aberdeen, Essex and Warwick. His career has been mainly as a teacher of drama in schools and colleges. Of the fifty or so productions he has directed, many have been by contemporary writers. His association with Howard Barker, extends back over twenty years to his production of Fair Slaughter at the Quay Theatre in Suffolk. He subsequently directed the premiere production of Crimes in Hot Countries and has also staged The Possibilities and Wounds to the Face by the same author. He has written a number of articles on contemporary theatre including ‘A Conversation’ with Howard Barker in his Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester University Press, 1993, 1997). He is the author of Howard Barker’s Theatre of Seduction (Harwood Academic, 1997) and The Theatre of Howard Barker (Routledge, 2005). Charles Lamb is an Associate of The Wrestling School.

CHRIS MEGSON is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has previously worked as an actor and political researcher. His recent publications include essays on Howard Barker (Blackwell), David Hare (Oxford University Press), British theatre during the Cold War (Routledge) and the impact of 1968 on British playwriting (Contemporary Theatre Review). He is currently researching contemporary approaches to documentary and ‘Verbatim’ theatre.

ROGER OWEN is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published in English and Welsh on theatre in Wales, and has also worked as a performer with Brith Gof and Eddie Ladd. He is a nucleus member of the Lurking Truth Theatre Company / Cwmni’r Gwir sy’n Llechu and has collaborated over a number of years with David Ian Rabey on such productions as Victory: Choices in Reaction, The Castle and The Early Hours of a Reviled Man by Barker, The Sons of Light by David Rudkin, and The Back of Beyond and The Hanging Judge by Rabey.

DAVID IAN RABEY is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His publications include the first book-length study of Barker’s work, Howard Barker: Politics and Desire (Macmillan, 1989), David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience (Harwood/Routledge, 1997) and English Drama Since 1940 (Longman’s Literature in English series, 2003). He is an Associate of The Wrestling School theatre company, and Artistic Director of Lurking Truth / Gwir sy’n Llechu theatre company, for whom he has written the plays The Back of Beyond and The Battle of the Crows (published together as The Wye Plays), Bite or Suck and Lovefuries. He has directed and/or acted in ten Barker productions to date, directing or co-directing Pity in History, Victory, The Castle, The Europeans, (Uncle) Vanya and Ursula, and performing as Scrope/Undy (in Victory), The Exaggerater in Don’t Exaggerate, Sleen in The Early Hours of a Reviled Man, Vanya in (Uncle) Vanya and Isonzo in Barker’s own production of The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo. He is currently under contract to Palgrave Press to write his second critical study of Barker’s work, Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death, covering the period 1988-2007, and is scheduled to direct a production of Gertrude–The Cry for 2007.

JAMES REYNOLDS graduated from Rose Bruford College with an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies, with Distinction. His dissertation thesis explored Howard Barker’s performance practice with The Wrestling School. James is currently undertaking PhD research into the theatre practices of Robert Lepage and Ex Machina at Queen Mary, University of London.

ELIZABETH SAKELLARIDOU is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies in the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has published extensively on contemporary British theatre. Her latest book is Women’s Theatre and the Brechtian Tradition (Athens, 2006, forthcoming). Her current research focuses on the performativity of pain and melancholia in tragedy.

ANDY W SMITH is Senior Lecturer and Subject Leader in Performing Arts in the International Film School Wales, University of Wales, Newport. His teaching and research interests include: site-specific theatre and video installation; post-war British and American theatre; American television and cinema; screen acting and media performance. Andy has written journal articles on cult television, and for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Thomson-Gale) has published on Welsh dramatists Ian Rowlands and Ed Thomas. Andy has forthcoming publications on postmodern teen horror in contemporary American cinema (Manchester University Press) and the relationship of graphic novels to Gothic literature and film (Routledge).

LIZ TOMLIN is Research Fellow in Performing Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Playwright and co-Artistic Director of Point Blank theatre, who have produced her plays Dead Causes (2000), Nothing to Declare (2002/3), Operation Wonderland (2004), Roses & Morphine (2005), Last Orders (2006). Her critical writing includes ‘English Theatre in the 1990s and Beyond’ in The Cambridge History of British Theatre vol 3 edited by Baz Kershaw (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Tnnocent Tourists? Neo-Colonialist Narratives in Contemporary Performance’ in Contemporary Theatre Review, 16, 1 (Routledge, 2006) and ‘Transgressing Boundaries: Postmodern Performance and the Tourist Trap’ in TDR 162 (1999).

HEINER ZIMMERMANN taught Drama and Theory at the Department of English at Heidelberg University. He has published a monograph on Shakespeare and over forty articles on Shakespeare, Fielding, ‘Yeats, Pinter, Stoppard, Wesker, Crimp and Barker in books and periodicals.

RAISING HELL

An Introduction to Howard Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe

DAVID IAN RABEY

1. BARKER: AN ODYSSEY OF RESTLESSNESS

The English dramatist-director Howard Barker (b. 1946) has, through a unique combination of style, content, theoretical argument and mise-en-scène, persistently countered conventional presumptions and propositions of the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ restrictions of how one might think, feel, speak, act, love and exist. His plays and productions refuse to offer an immediately, readily or completely recognisable world. They offer something more profoundly alluring and haunting: the resonant collisions, surprising embraces and mesmeric duels of characters who advertise their theatricality and stake everything on their own powers and politics of performance. His work offers a purposefully anti-naturalistic expansion of vocabulary: of language, terms of experience, scenic and physical expression, and being.

Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through her/his diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre (as Barker calls it, an Art of Theatre) which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with theatre’. This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible.

Barker’s stage plays first appeared in British theatres in the early 1970s, at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs and the Open Space, at which time his first radio plays were also broadcast by the BBC. In 1975, Claw premiered at the Open Space, and Stripwell opened on the Royal Court main stage, as did Fair Slaughter in 1977. Always prolific, Barker was active with and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Warehouse Theatre (That Good Between Us, 1977; The Hang of the Gaol, 1978; The Loud Boy’s Life, 1980), Oxford Playhouse and Sheffield Crucible (The Love of a Good Man, 1978/9; No End of Blame, 1981; A Passion in Six Days, 1983). At this stage, Barker’s plays were muscular, savagely comic attacks on the promises of social authority; an authority which achieves its ends through various forms of confidence trickery. Those in power establish rules and principles (based on justice, law, democracy) by which they themselves are unconstrained. They provide distractions, incentives and promises of security to prevent their subjects from recognising and emulating their deceit. Moreover, Barker’s plays depict political power shaped and complicated by the urgings of sexual passion, sometimes unlived but always eruptive. This passion may not always be a force of disclosure; sometimes personal pathology informs and shapes social repression. Barker’s imaginative compulsion to push beyond surfaces and current reflexes was exemplified by the way that whilst, like some of his contemporaries, he analyzed the rhetoric and historical mission of the British political Right (in Loud Boy and Birth on a Hard Shoulder, 1980), he presented in That Good a dystopian view of an imagined future Labour government. Barker’s drama was also keenly and unusually aware of counterpoints between the English present and the European past, especially in Fair Slaughter, The Love of a Good Man and The Power of the Dog (1984), and his finest achievement of this period and style is his first major consideration of power and the artist, No End of Blame.

However, Barker’s imaginative restlessness and stylistic self-development drove him to new forms, plays of contradiction rather than of analytic thesis. These plays often excavated a startlingly re-visioned history which challenged conventional obedience to the moralities of documentary and theatrical realism; they discarded satire of the contemporary in order to glimpse what Barker termed ‘anti-history’: an unofficial (indeed, anti-official) account of formative and recurrent historical events, in the tragic odysseys of marginalised and obscured figures, who demonstrate the promptings of passion (the pain of wanting), melancholy (the sensed inevitability of irrevocable loss) and the illogical persistence of the human spirit. This period begins with the abrasive, fractured landscape of Victory (1983), the sexual yearning and enquiry into national promise in Crimes in Hot Countries (1983) and leads to Barker’s first major tragedy The Castle (1985), a densely brooding and deeply resonant excoriation of the psychic entanglements of gender, sexuality, war and power. The Castle was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Pit, as the centrepiece of an unfortunately brief retrospective season (‘Barker at the Pit’), which also included the professional premiere of Crimes in Hot Countries and the hitherto unperformed Downchild (written 1977), a fine example of Barker’s earlier style which subverted the form of the comedy thriller to condemn the imaginative failures, betrayals and constrictions of the Harold Wilson era which, in the words of that play’s protagonist, ‘made stupor rhyme with socialism’. Also in 1985, the BBC production of Barker’s radio play Scenes from an Execution won the Prix Italia; this dramatisation of artistic impulse, political assimilation and state ownership became recognized as a classic of the radio drama form, and also had an extended life as a frequently and internationally revived stage play.

Women Beware Women (1986) and The Bite of the Night (1988) were the final two flowerings of Barker’s associations with the Royal Court and the RSC, respectively. Women Beware Women was the first major example of Barker’s so-called ‘conversations with dead authors’, his reanimations of classic texts to pursue new enquiries from the springboard of familiar theatrical and cultural conclusions: here he hi-jacked the form and characters of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean tragedy to present a more disruptive speculation on sexual transformation and its threat to civic discipline. Rejected by the Royal Court (as the RSC would in turn reject The Europeans), The Bite of the Night was his most ambitious play to date, an innovative four-and-a-half-hour investigation of the mythic imagination of successive societies, and the prescriptive gesture politics of various representatives of different sexual conditionings, delineated in terms and images which were both visceral and increasingly poetic. Indeed, Bite represents a full breakthrough into Barker’s unique form of poetic theatre, a politically resonant form of expressionism he termed Theatre of Catastrophe, which was developed by The Europeans (written 1987) and Rome (written 1989, published 1993, and still awaiting a full professional production). The Europeans (staged at the University of Aberystwyth in 1991 and by The Wrestling School in 1993) is one of Barker’s most masterful and continuingly resonant works, a harrowing love story set in the aftermath of Islamic-Christian cultural war, and dramatising the power of the individual to re-perform and subvert the political mayhem which political systems impose on people.

1988 saw the formation of The Wrestling School, a theatre company founded by the actor-director Kenny Ireland with the main objective of premiering and reassessing Barker’s plays in production. Ireland directed The Last Supper (1988), Seven Lears (1989), a revival of Victory (1991) and The Europeans (1993), but his humanist directorial instincts were increasingly at odds with Barker’s ever more searching and uncompromising texts. Barker directed his own work with Ego in Arcadia (Italy, 1992) and Hated Nightfall for The Wrestling School in 1994. Indeed, from then on, Barker became the principal director of his own theatre company, The Wrestling School, and expanded his verbal and dramatic ambition and experimentation into a unique theatrical style involving a distinctive boldness in movement and scenographic effects. Barker has developed a sense of pictorial stage composition, informed by his work as a painter, in which movement acquired a near-balletic choreographic precision and the soundscape became an additional ‘sonic character’ alongside scrupulously delivered language of operatic reach and scale. His theatre is uniquely distinguished by its classical discipline, visual imagery, and moral ruthlessness. His combination of text with precisely orchestrated mise-en-scène makes him a British composer of theatre comparable to Robert Wilson, and the publication of the theoretical essays which underpin his practical experimentations (in the volumes Arguments fora Theatre and Death, The One and the Art of Theatre) emphasise the ways that his forms of artistic enquiry involve challenges to social objectives: here, the aesthetic (and the poetic) is political.

2. THE FORTIFIED CASTLE AND THE FLAYED SKIN

Barker’s work exemplifies and demonstrates the power and principles of seduction as characterised by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. I here wish to acknowledge, in appreciation, the writing of Charles Lamb (latterly in The Theatre of Howard Barker, Routledge, 2005), which first makes the link between Baudrillard and Barker, with specific references to their theories of performance, and self-performance; but I would like to develop the range of associations which one can project (in the geometric sense) from this link. This initiative might appropriately begin with a consideration of what I would suggest to be Barker’s principal artistic project: the reassessment of all values, by a formal estrangement of what might conventionally be recognisable or familiar. His repudiation and defiance of the familiar and recognisable terms of so-called ‘real life’, and of conventional theatrical naturalism, finds argumentative support in Baudrillard’s rhetorical assertion:

This links with Barker’s assertion, Only catastrophe can keep us clean’, and his refinement of the terms of his form of tragedy, Theatre of Catastrophe. In words from his 1986 revisioning of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women:

Compare Baudrillard’s valorisation of the catastrophe which lurks behind the accepted terms of ‘real life’, where ‘real life’ is something hitherto accepted and apparently inclusive, now perforated and undermined by the principles of seduction and reversibility:

And, indeed, Baudrillard’s account of the process and dynamics of seduction might also serve as a description of the duels at the centre of Barker’s dramas, their struggles for the terms of power and sexuality (which are usually shown to be linked):

Barker’s drama proposes, in the words of his play Golgo, that ‘There are those recorded, and those who fail to be recorded, obviously there is OTHER TESTAMENT!… ALWAYS OTHER TESTAMENT!’. Thus Barker opposes History – the imposition of ideological and moral narrative form – with Anti-History – the disruptive fragmentation of this form by the testimony and performance of individual pain, a pain articulated by characters who are socially marginalized but capable of displacing the labellers and ‘Historical Authorities’ from centre stage; thereby these characters demonstrate the insecurity of all promised reconciliation and the instability of all order. The very spatial dynamic of plays such as Hated Nightfall, (Uncle) Vanya, The Early Hours of a Reviled Man, Golgo and The Fence are strong examples of a literally ‘hell-raising’ Barkerian trope, in that some personified force conventionally repressed or marginalised as ‘abject’ erupts into the centre of the stage action to claim dramatic primacy and wreak havoc (Dancer in Hated Nightfall: ‘The world abhors me. It writhes to know I walk upon its surfaces… Ijump on it‘; ‘Chaos. How it suits me. It’s my medium’). Such transgressive protagonists are sometimes in turn catechised by choric figures, resembling the classical Eumenides or furies, except that this outraged chorus represents a moral-historical order, which would reclaim and/ or prosecute the transgressor(s). However, the fundamentally conventional terms of this chorus are eluded, questioned and/or reversed by the protagonists’ sense of what Stephen Greenblatt–of whom more later – would call ‘absolute play’ (Dancer: ‘What you describe as a rebuke to me, is no more or less than my desire’).

In their provocation and examination of the catastrophic collapse of conventional values, Barker’s plays necessarily interrogate myths of political totality, and generate imaginative seismic reverberations into various areas of global political tensions. Either metaphorically or literally, these tensions are centred upon what the French philosopher Julia Kristeva calls ‘that fragile spot of our subjectivity’, a vulnerable part of the self ‘where our collapsed defenses reveal, beneath the appearances of a fortified castle, a flayed skin’.⁵ Indeed, Barker’s plays The Castle (1985), The Europeans (1987) and A Hard Heart (1992) take as their central images fortification and sieges. They demonstrate an incessant drive for one-upmanship, escalating terms, outbidding, ostentatious performance and concessionary sacrifice – crucially, of other people – in the interests of a supposed larger game-plan. This drive is often associated with the sexual reflexes of an individual psyche, projecting itself onto others, because insecure and therefore paranoically desperate to establish a control, or monopoly, of definition – which inevitably turns out to be doomed and flawed. The architect of The Castle, in the play of that title, creates an edifice which will re-present and amplify the sexual conditioning of his captor and ruler; the architect knows that The Castle ‘will create enemies where there are none’, and the more insistently it escalates, the more devastating are the repercussions when its inevitable Achilles heel is discovered, and its weight of invested definition is turned against itself in collapse.⁶ I hope, from even this brief account, you will glean a sense of how these plays predict aspects of post-9/11 global politics and the paradoxical reflexes of the so-called Var on terror’.

3. SHATTERED MIRRORS AND ABSOLUTE PLAY

But I would also argue that Barker’s drama offers further insights, in terms which other theories might help us to appreciate fully. Stephen Greenblatt’s theories of Self-Fashioning start from the argument that ‘in sixteenth-century England there were both selves and a sense that they could be fashioned’, where ‘the power to impose a shape upon oneself is an aspect of the more general power to control identity – that of others at least as often as one’s own’.⁷ Perhaps one might identify an affinity of impulse and cultural climate between ‘sixteenth-century England’ and late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain (both Thatcherite and Blairite), highlighted by Greenblatt’s terms:

Put simply, Greenblatt suggests that the Renaissance saw ‘an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’.⁹ He argues that the Renaissance was a time of unprecedented negotiation between, on the one hand, the experience of being moulded by political, social and cultural forces outside one’s control, forces which were apparently benign and neo-liberal but ultimately totalitarian; and, on the other hand, the imaginative effort to shape one’s own identity. Of course, human nature cannot exist independent of culture and its control mechanisms (plans, rules and instructions) for the governing of behaviour: this is a system of meanings, Greenblatt claims,

Barker’s imagining, and increasing control of the theatrical production, of his dramatic works is consciously and purposefully performed in these philosophical and practical terms. His Shakespearean re-evaluations and reanimations of historical figures, literary characters and existing dramatic texts are a conscious address to the poetics of an English (-speaking / -reading) culture, frequently and startlingly (re)located in a European context. In such instances, existing texts and characters are viewed ‘as the focal point for converging lines of force’¹¹ in culture, sites of interplay between structures and interpretations which inform the constructions of identity. Greenblatt notes how: ‘We respond to a quality, even a willed or partially willed quality, in the figures…who are, we assume by analogy to ourselves, engaged in their own acts of selection and shaping and who seem to drive themselves towards the most sensitive regions of their culture, to express and even, by design, to embody its dominant satisfactions and anxieties’.¹² This is, if anything, more consistently true of Barker’s characters than even Shakespeare’s or Marlowe’s; Barker’s characters are frequently, if not always willingly or enviably, propelled into particularly stark forms of ‘cultural embodiment’. They are, in current performance terms, ‘explicit body performers’, dramatically fictional but at least to some degree authentically theatrically manifested by the courage of the performer, as in efforts of will involving speech, action and physical disclosure (such as nakedness) which throw notions and criteria of ‘authenticity’ into play.

Moreover I would propose that both Barker’s drama and his theatrical productions exemplify and explore what Julia Kristeva identifies as the effect of abjection: the imperfect process whereby the symbolism of a dominant social system tries to exclude some embarrassing thing or body which calls its boundaries into question, but finds it cannot part with, or separate from, it completely; the creature who represents embarrassing possibility comes back, even more compulsively, to call the prevailing notion of (im)possibility into question. The social and theatrical space that surrounds the Barker protagonist is, as in Kristeva’s terms, ‘essentially divisible, foldable and catastrophic’. This unforgivable protagonist constantly (re)describes her/his self in her/his social surroundings, whose ‘fluid confines…constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh’.¹³ Violent and painful passions generate tensions which erupt and burst, as the protagonist decides to shatter the mirrors of conventional reflection which surround them.

A striking example of these effects occurs in Barker’s play The Early Hours of a Reviled Man (broadcast by BBC Radio 1988; directed for the stage by Roger Owen, Aberystwyth Theatr y Castell 1990), in which Sleen, a doctor and eminent novelist of reactionary views, takes his regular perambulation through the streets where he has loved, triumphed and suffered. He is accosted by old friends and new enemies, all invoking a sense of justice he is determined never to satisfy. The play’s inspiration is the historical figure of the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose writing depicted life fatalistically as a series of catastrophes, in which only death and the process of dying have dominion, and only the energy of hatred promises relief from feelings of personal emptiness and persecution.¹⁴ Barker’s Sleen is a masterful dramatisation of the compulsive drive and stealthy ability to defy all forms of moral superiority; Sleen defines himself through doing the ‘Unfashionable / And / Untolerated / Thing’,¹⁵ and, like other charismatic Barker protagonists, his potency resides in his command of imaginative (self-) invention. These characters achieve what Greenblatt identifies as the quintessential sign of power, ‘the ability to impose one’s own fictions on the world’.¹⁶ The persistence of Céline/Sleen’s offensiveness, and the resentment which his paradoxical qualities inspire, makes him an appropriate figure for Barker’s exploration: he is self-armoured in pessimistic fatalism which does not inhibit his wilful refusal to submit or be ‘smothered’ by conventional ideals of happiness, rationality, longevity or utilitarianism. Sleen exposes the insecurity underlying his enemies’ insistence on separating themselves from him: ‘I deserve everything I get, but so do you’. Indeed, their moral outrage is revealed as a hysterical compulsion to distinguish or redeem themselves by asserting their own superiority over him, a reflex of abjection which nevertheless gives Sleen an irrational power, to dissolve their limits of identity.

Kristeva, in her book of theoretical poetics Powers of Horror, identifies the Abject as

The figure of Sleen, a brilliant novelist and doctor to the poor who is also anti-semitic, and his progress through the city exemplify and dramatise the very effects of which Kristeva writes; appropriately, since her study is partly concerned to identify the dynamics of mutual degradation in the writings of Céline, his assault on the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane. She notes how such a figure calls all borders into question, because abjection ‘is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’.¹⁸ In this sense, The Early Hours is a jet-black comedy of abjection and contamination, in which Sleen’s pursuers represent the subjects who wish to separate themselves from his unforgivably questioning presence, but who find their boundaries continually problematized or dissolved by his sheer persistence in existence, and their inability to murder him. His very presence conducts the others through a series of revelatory scenes which demonstrate to them how their dependency on postures of correctness and self-identifications with moral superiority debar them from his unshakeable purchase on the imagination – even on theirs. The Early Hours is one of Barker’s most profoundly comic disruptions of the terms of moral identity, and examples of what Greenblatt calls ‘absolute play’, the pursuit of the unforgivable through shameless performance which disrupts the containments of conventional morality:

4. THE CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS OF A SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMATIST

The interrogation of received cultural forms and associated moral wisdoms is an important, and often particularly subversive, strategy available to all artists, beyond the potentially sterile literary fashion for (identifying) intertextuality. Jeanette Winterson, for example, argues how, in her chosen realm of fiction, texts are ‘always in dialogue’ with other texts in a process which is importantly dynamic, rather than static for both reader and writer; her own process of making what she terms ‘cover versions of stories that we know very well’ is a way of finding new angles and possibilities with which to inject ‘fresh material into what already exists, so the story changes’ and is ‘kept alive by the retelling, by the changing… I think of it not as a literary game, nor as an exercise, but as a necessary nourishment from one text to another’.²⁰ I have noted elsewhere, not only how the work of Shakespeare provides richly fertile ground for such re-evaluative imaginings, but how his work is itself the most vibrant classical exemplification of this very strategy, and how we might speak with proper accuracy and seriousness of someone ‘Being a Shakespearean Dramatist’:

Barker was significantly nominated by the late Sarah Kane as ‘the Shakespeare of our age’.²² However, Barker’s own model of practice might be at least as much influenced by classical traditions of painting, wherein numerous artists present their distinctive and distinguishing compositions of and perspectives on subjects, such as the Crucifixion, narratives from the Apochrypha and images from classical epics and myths, as part of a continuum of both hommage and making new argument from old matter. A fine example is provided by Barker’s (Uncle) Vanya (produced at the University of Aberystwyth in 1995 and by The Wrestling School in 1996). As Barker observed in 1994 about his imaginative reconsiderations of ‘voids and absences’:

Barker’s (Uncle) Vanya begins with a savagely comic condensation of Chekhov’s world, in which the characters perform extreme versions of their monotonous self-preoccupation. Only Vanya has the painful emotional and imaginative mobility to step outside the frame of the action, to express with extravagant ruthlessness his (conventionally subtextual) agonized passions to the audience; but, even though he can pause and comment on the action of the play, he seems powerless to alter its course. In his articulate despair, Vanya invites audience judgement on other characters and his own motives whilst artfully challenging their terms of definition and reaches of imagination: ‘Do you agree the professor is vile or do I slander him am I correct or extreme HE GOES TO BED WITH SUCH A YOUNG WOMAN am I poisoned by sexual jealousy or HE PUTS HIS FLESH INSIDE HER BODY or or or’.²⁴ Even the object of his adoration Helena tells (taunts?) him, ‘^bu should stop grumbling and reconcile people to one another’ (p 302) and his beloved niece Sonya drones the mantras of conventional futile hope: ‘Uncle Vanya will be happy one day, won’t you Uncle, happy one day?’ (p 303). However, Barker’s Vanya successfully shoots Serebryakov (whereas Chekhov’s Vanya repeatedly misses), and is thereby committed to a life outside conventional morality. Even Helena expects him to turn himself in to the police. However, Vanya is defiantly, exhilaratingly unrepentant, even when her husband reappears as a ghost and tries to make Vanya stop his rebellion. Barker’s Vanya seems prepared to break from the melancholy of Chekhov’s world, crucially and defiantly preferring to accept consequences:

As I have commented elsewhere, ‘Barker’s Vanya reveals that Chekhov’s play is only nominally play: it is more accurately an essay in…limitation…Vanya bursts the walls of Chekhov’s play by pursuing the unforgivable’.²⁵ However, Chekhov enters the play as a character and force seeking to reassert control, maintaining that the characters’ attempted revolution was only an adolescent rebellion, ‘A mutiny is merely the affirmation of things after all’ (p 329). Indeed, when Chekhov himself dies, the other characters apart from Vanya seem to find it necessary to reinvent and incorporate him in their habitual reflexes and fears of freedom. Finally even Vanya seems ready to accept the judgement and death sentence issued by the chorus of remaining characters, now a mixture of dead and living ghosts, but at the fateful moment he chooses not to yield, not even to his grief at the suicide of Helena. He chooses to live further in instinctive imaginative defiance of the limitations which all the other characters have enviously sought to place upon him. Struggling with shock and grief, he nevertheless identifies a responsibility towards his own potential and discovers the ‘effort of will’ which takes him out of the room.

Barker’s play (Uncle) Vanya offers the audience an experience in which the theatrical conventions of Chekhovian naturalism are exposed and vividly dramatised as forms which permit and reflect an imaginative self-limitation, even the dignifying of depression, in distinctively English rather than Russian terms of systematic self-abnegation and limitation. (Uncle) Vanya dramatises and demonstrates the possibility of broaching the definitions inherent in Chekhovian form and, analogously, its attendant enshrinement of social and personal determinism in the theatres of both national culture and personal consciousness. The effects of delimitation in this play importantly extend to the space and setting, the plasticity of which reflects the human upheaval, for example in the fragmentation of the house and the incursion of the sea, whilst replacing the stage conventions of theatrical naturalism and realism (which are explicitly identified with conformity in objectified imaginative defeat) with unpredictable effects of rupture and transformation.

5. A LAW UNTO HIMSELF

Hated Nightfall (1994) offers in many ways a classical example of Barker’s work: a figure usually excluded from or submerged by history – the tutor of the Romanoff children, Dancer – pursues his own claim to significance, an apotheosis of absolute play, murderous abandon and vengeful erotic dedication, with wry but lethal disregard for the agents of historical order and official ideologies who attempt to interrupt him. In a speculation about the last hours of the Russian Imperial family in 1918, the play imagines the brief incandescence of Dancer, whose sexual fixation on his mistress is permitted tortured expression amidst the social reversals; he offers himself as a self-consuming harbinger of death. As Barker observes in the programme essay for the 1994 Wrestling School production of the play, entitled ‘Saintliness, Death and the Perfect Family’:

Dancer seizes the opportunity for an orchestrated expression of his own precisely excessive eroticism to take centre stage. Johan Engels’s set for the Wrestling School production of Hated Nightfall featured plastic walls, apparently firm boundaries which could suddenly deliriously warp, as the obscured faces of the Chorus pressed their clamouring features through the fabric to pronounce on the central action before vanishing or being banished again by Dancer, who, like Sleen, defies the ostentatious moral incomprehension and terms of permission of his adversaries. When a Romanoff daughter suggests ‘you are not really bad, citizen’, he insists ‘I am / I am that bad (Pause.) / Believe me. / You merely cannot bear to contemplate it’.²⁷ When Dancer kills a bureaucratic representative of the new historical order, the Chorus protest, ‘We can forgive the revolutionary death but this’ (p 7) and denounce Dancer as ‘INSANE‘, he contemptuously replies, ‘You would say that! How Necessary you should think I am insane! Think so if it relieves you!’ (p 8). He refuses terms of legitimacy: ‘I do not call myself History. The Agent of Destiny. Justice. The People’s Will. I don’t drape myself; ‘This is not History. This is the opposite of History’ (p 33). Master of a crucially limited time and space, Dancer is determined to be ‘a law unto myself (p 9) (a principle of the Barker aesthetic), a master of anti-official ceremonies. However, ‘The spell is broken’ (p 42) when Romanoff re-establishes the hierarchy of his family relationships and forges a brief alliance with the revolutionaries to deny Dancer his apotheosis; this resurgence of moral consensus brings down Dancer, literally and physically, for his crimes of ‘ARROGANT / AND / PETULANT / DISHARMONY‘ (p 46); but most injuriously, it threatens a death which Dancer fears will be ‘poorer than my imagination predicted’ (p 47).