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Barker: Plays Five (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the FaceHoward 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 wilful 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.
Barker: Plays Two (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays The Castle, Gertrude - The Cry, Animals in Paradise and 13 Objects.Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The plays in this volume examine collisions of culture, gender and creed at moments of turmoil, developing the tragic form Barker defines as Theatre of Catastrophe.The Castle is set at the end of Crusades and describes the clashes that occur when returning soldiers bring an Arab architect home with them as a prisoner. Barker's abiding interest in interrogating the great classics for their 'silences' is shown in Gertrude - The Cry, his re-writing of the Hamlet story. Scarcely examined in Shakespeare, the passion of Gertrude for Claudius is made the centre of this harrowing tragedy, casting new light on the personality of Hamlet himself. Animals in Paradise was commissioned by the Swedish and Danish governments to celebrate their connection by bridge, a symbolic finish to centuries of antagonism. Barker's unexpected treatment of the theme provoked unrest on its first showing.13 Objects movingly reveals the investment we make in inanimate things, their power to unsettle us, and how their talismanic qualities license new ways of seeing the world.
Blok/Eko (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Howard BarkerHoward Barker’s theatre is characterized by its tragic scale and its distinctive way of exposing the unconscious resistances that underlie apparent social unanimity, both in the sexual and political spheres.Barker’s play, BLOK/EKO, is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world. Eko, an ageing despot, seemingly on a whim liquidates the entire medical profession, asserting that consolation – in the form of song – is a better way with sickness than drugs or surgery. A connoisseur herself, she knows great song is itself the distillation of suffering and so deliberately exposes her greatest poet Tot to a life of crime, poverty and humiliation in order to extract from him his finest work.BLOK/EKO is the first outcome of Barker’s residence as Creative Fellow at the University of Exeter (2010-2012) and the main element of his Plethora/Bare Sufficiency project.
Dead Hands (Oberon Modern Plays Ser.)
by Howard BarkerA young man rushes to reach the bedside of his dying father, but arrives too late. His younger brother was present at the death, but his attitude is strangely ambiguous, and the elder brother becomes suspicious. The intentions of the dead man's mistress are also unclear. The mourners become increasingly consumed by feverish imagining, building a powerfully tense atmosphere as their characters start to disintegrate.This new play by international dramatist, poet and theorist, Howard Barker, toured in a production by The Wrestling School theatre company in 2005.
Death, The One and the Art of Theatre
by Howard BarkerDeath, 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.
Death, The One and the Art of Theatre
by Howard BarkerDeath, 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.
The Ecstatic Bible (Absolute Classics Ser.)
by Howard BarkerA New Testament informed by the turmoil of the twentieth century, The Ecstatic Bible is a series of interlocking narratives based around the 100-year courtship of a faithless priest and a woman whose decision to abandon free will and collude with every circumstance leads them into extraordinary situations both comic and horrific. Passionate and provocative, this bible of amorality is driven by a wildly inventive plot and language rich in poetry and humour.
The Fence in its Thousandth Year (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Howard BarkerThe Fence in its Thousandth Year was inspired by the long distance fence whilst it was under construction in the Gaza to separate the Palestinian and Jewish communities.Set in a world of rising frontiers and illegal immigration, The Fence uses powerful poetic language, provocative ideas and rich, dark humour to build a compelling epic about scandal in a ruling monarchy and its subsequent downfall.At the heart of this tale is the intensely personal story of a blind boy’s struggle to discover his true identity in a world where nothing is what it seems...The Fence, produced by the Wrestling Company, opened at the Birmingham Rep in June 2005, followed by a UK tour.
Howard Barker: Plays Nine (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerHoward Barker’s form of tragedy – his Theatre of Catastrophe – is a speculation on the way individuals dislocated by social or personal crises make meaning from their pain, sometimes willing their own extinction, sometimes altering the terms on which they might continue to exist. Their actions are not judged and no attempt is made to influence or console. In Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews, a gifted musician is banished to the remotest region of an empire by an autocrat he had complacently regarded as a patron and a friend. A moral and intellectual duel is played out over the distance of a thousand miles. In the Depths of Dead Love is set in a feudal China. A similarly exiled man scrapes a living by renting out his peculiar property – a bottomless well – to aspiring suicides. Among these is a married couple who exert an appalling influence over him. As in all great tragedy, an uncomfortable vein of comedy runs through the work, not to relieve but to intensify its contradictions… In the Cloth Cathedral describes the rise of an assassin, the killer of an archbishop who he condemns for preaching religion without God. His prosecutor, a brilliant but tormented lawyer, finds himself seduced by the integrity of the criminal’s character, ending up as his accomplice. One of the finest discordant duets in Barker’s work, the warring protagonists are surrounded by a chorus of the vengeful, the forgiving, and the dead… More No Still is set in yet deeper chaos. The female protagonist Sway takes refuge from the nausea of debate by substituting practised poses for articulated speech. In her search for a model society, she is accompanied by an escaped criminal with whom she finds a city of rampant roses and draconian laws. She falls in love for the first time – not with the city’s governor, a reactionary priest – but with his infant self who exists simultaneously and in the same dimension. Barker’s capacity for meditation and the most daring theatrical imagination are here combined with particular intensity.
Howard Barker: 1870; Dans le Palais Je; Deep Wives / Shallow Animals; Knowledge and a Girl (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerThe latest collection of plays from one of the most celebrated, influential and studied playwrights in the English-speaking world. Howard Barker's plays continue to challenge, unsettle and expose.Barker's theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year in a sordid room. Inevitably they are inspected by God, but in a shape none could have predicted and only he can delight in. In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker's nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful words which arrive in sealed envelopes to prepare her for a succession of ordeals. Deep Wives and Knowledge and a Girl are short pieces, firmly established in the European theatre repertoire. In the first, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog. In Knowledge and a Girl, Barker reinterprets the Snow White fable from the perspective of the Stepmother.
Howard Barker: 1870; Dans le Palais Je; Deep Wives / Shallow Animals; Knowledge and a Girl (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerThe latest collection of plays from one of the most celebrated, influential and studied playwrights in the English-speaking world. Howard Barker's plays continue to challenge, unsettle and expose.Barker's theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year in a sordid room. Inevitably they are inspected by God, but in a shape none could have predicted and only he can delight in. In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker's nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful words which arrive in sealed envelopes to prepare her for a succession of ordeals. Deep Wives and Knowledge and a Girl are short pieces, firmly established in the European theatre repertoire. In the first, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog. In Knowledge and a Girl, Barker reinterprets the Snow White fable from the perspective of the Stepmother.
Howard Barker: At Her Age and Hers; Landscape with Cries; Womanly; Four Dialogues; True Condition (Modern Plays)
by Howard BarkerThe theatre of Howard Barker subverts myth and invents history in its pursuit of the meaning of individual integrity. Repudiating politics and asserting the primacy of the emotions, Barker's tragedy is written in a language by turns poetic and brutally mundane. The effects are disconcerting and destabilizing, as he insists tragedy must be. The twelfth and final collection of plays from this celebrated, influential and widely-studied playwright includes:At Her Age and Hers, which uses Velázquez's painting Las Meninas to meditate on the making of a work of art, removing the figures from the frame, animating them, and assembling them again.Landscape with Cries, which invokes the savagery of the Peasants' Revolt of fourteenth-century France to create an unlikely heroine. Womanly, a play which is alternatively dreamlike and nightmarish in its biography of Elbow, the aptly named protagonist who defies the conventional morals of her day. Four Dialogues which are small in size of cast, but ambitious in their confrontations with the ideas of faith, language, and longing. Struggling to define their needs, the characters come near to the final purpose of Barker's dramatic endeavour – the discovery of a reason to exist.True Condition – both the title of the play and the name of an unseaworthy vessel – which tells of the final voyage of a boat crewed by criminals.
Howard Barker: At Her Age and Hers; Landscape with Cries; Womanly; Four Dialogues; True Condition (Modern Plays)
by Howard BarkerThe theatre of Howard Barker subverts myth and invents history in its pursuit of the meaning of individual integrity. Repudiating politics and asserting the primacy of the emotions, Barker's tragedy is written in a language by turns poetic and brutally mundane. The effects are disconcerting and destabilizing, as he insists tragedy must be. The twelfth and final collection of plays from this celebrated, influential and widely-studied playwright includes:At Her Age and Hers, which uses Velázquez's painting Las Meninas to meditate on the making of a work of art, removing the figures from the frame, animating them, and assembling them again.Landscape with Cries, which invokes the savagery of the Peasants' Revolt of fourteenth-century France to create an unlikely heroine. Womanly, a play which is alternatively dreamlike and nightmarish in its biography of Elbow, the aptly named protagonist who defies the conventional morals of her day. Four Dialogues which are small in size of cast, but ambitious in their confrontations with the ideas of faith, language, and longing. Struggling to define their needs, the characters come near to the final purpose of Barker's dramatic endeavour – the discovery of a reason to exist.True Condition – both the title of the play and the name of an unseaworthy vessel – which tells of the final voyage of a boat crewed by criminals.
Howard Barker: Plays Ten (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerThe latest collection of plays by Howard Barker, one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of our time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. Plays Ten comprises the plays Ahno, Distance, Critique of Pure Feeling, Irrespective, Immense Kiss, Exquisite.
Lot and His God (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Howard Barker‘I came to the city. I saw the people were filthy. And those who were not filthy were still filthy…’Sodom. The day before the city’s total annihilation. Among the grimy tables of a run-down café, an angel tells Lot that God wants him to flee, before the city is obliterated. However, Lot’s irresistible wife has other ideas... As the angel and Lot’s wife embark on a dangerous game of seduction, cruelty and desire, we are drawn ever deeper into the dark and impenetrable forest that is the marriage between Lot and the bewitching woman he worships…‘I must learn to keep my mouth shut when there are angels in the room...’
Scenes from an Execution: Victory - The Europeans - The Possibilites - Scenes From An Execution (Oberon Modern Playwright's Ser.)
by Howard BarkerCommissioned to paint a vast canvas celebrating the triumphant Battle of Lepanto, the free-spirited Galactia creates instead a breathtaking scene of war-torn carnage. In her fierce determination to stay true to herself, she alienates the authorities and faces incarceration. Her younger lover Carpeta is approached to take over and seizes the assignment for himself.Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution makes sixteenth-century Venice the setting for a fearless exploration of sexual politics and the timeless tension between personal ambition and moral responsibility, between the patron’s demands and the artist’s autonomy.Art is opinion, and opinion is the source of all authority.This edition includes a new essay by Howard Barker, entitled The Sunless Garden of the Unconsolled: Some Destinations Beyond Catastrophe.
The Seduction of Almighty God (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Howard Barker"The Seduction of Almighty God" is set during the dissolution of the monasteries, a critical moment in the history of the English priesthood. The loss of faith and cynical corruption of the few priests left at the Abbey of Calcetto is unexpectedly challenged by the arrival of a young man with an unsullied and passionate belief in God. The boy Loftus gradually acquires a huge moral ascendancy through the intensity and purity of his faith, but he is then brutally punished by the priests. Powerful poetic language, provocative ideas and rich, dark humour build a thought-provoking allegory for one of the key issues of our times. Howard Barker invents a world of shocking and universal metaphor in a place that might be anywhere struggling with the rise of extreme belief and the dangerous distorted power it unleashes.
Slowly/Hurts Given and Received: Judith - Vanya, A House Of Correction - Hurts Given And Received (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Howard BarkerTwo new plays by Howard BarkerSlowly As barbarians approach the palace of a decaying culture, four princesses debate their fate. Decorum demands suicide. But, for some, the possibility of life is all too compelling. In a culture of conformity, it may not be up to the individual to decide...Hurts Given and Received Howard Barker re-examines the creative life of the artist through one of his most fascinating and appalling creations. Provocative ideas, pungent poetic language, and savage wit build a thought-provoking allegory of the artist’s relationship with society.‘Barker, with witty, wicked glee, pricks the pomposity of the tortured artist.’ - The Times‘Howard Barker’s new play is an ambiguous interrogation of the artistic impulse.’ - Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out London
A Style and Its Origins
by Howard BarkerHoward 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.
Live To Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting
by M. BarkerThe digital broadcasting of performances to cinemas, or 'livecasting', burst onto the world scene in 2006. This book explores the reasons for its rise, examines the aesthetics of filming theatre and opera performances, and explores who the audiences are and what they want.
Producers' Choice: Promise; Oedipus/Antigone; Tory Boyz; Butterfly Club; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Punk Rock (Play Anthologies)
by Megan Barker DJ Britton James Graham Sarah May Simon Reade Simon StephensProducers' Choice: Six Plays for Young Performers showcases some of the best plays for young people produced by the UK's leading theatre companies. The plays are ideal for young performers aged 13-25 and offer a diverse range of challenges, styles and subjects. The volume will prove essential for teachers and students of Drama and for youth drama groups. The plays include modern reworkings of classics, such as Simon Reade's witty and brilliantly inventive adaptation of Lewis Carroll's much-loved fantasy, and DJ Britton's version of Sophocles' Theban plays, the tragic Oedipus/Antigone. Contemporary teenage issues are dealt with in Megan Barker's beautiful and uplifting Promise and Sarah May's The Butterfly Club. Simon Stephens' hit-play Punk Rock set in a grammar school explores dislocation and aggression among sixth form pupils; James Graham's Tory Boyz is a fast-paced, political comedy about prejudice and ambition in Westminster.Each play features production notes and the volume is introduced by Paul Roseby, Artistic Director of the National Youth Theatre. For schools, youth theatre groups and drama colleges this anthology of thematically and stylistically diverse plays will prove an invaluable resource.
Producers' Choice: Promise; Oedipus/Antigone; Tory Boyz; Butterfly Club; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Punk Rock (Play Anthologies)
by Megan Barker Dj Britton James Graham Sarah May Simon Reade Simon Stephens Paul RosebyProducers' Choice: Six Plays for Young Performers showcases some of the best plays for young people produced by the UK's leading theatre companies. The plays are ideal for young performers aged 13-25 and offer a diverse range of challenges, styles and subjects. The volume will prove essential for teachers and students of Drama and for youth drama groups. The plays include modern reworkings of classics, such as Simon Reade's witty and brilliantly inventive adaptation of Lewis Carroll's much-loved fantasy, and DJ Britton's version of Sophocles' Theban plays, the tragic Oedipus/Antigone. Contemporary teenage issues are dealt with in Megan Barker's beautiful and uplifting Promise and Sarah May's The Butterfly Club. Simon Stephens' hit-play Punk Rock set in a grammar school explores dislocation and aggression among sixth form pupils; James Graham's Tory Boyz is a fast-paced, political comedy about prejudice and ambition in Westminster.Each play features production notes and the volume is introduced by Paul Roseby, Artistic Director of the National Youth Theatre. For schools, youth theatre groups and drama colleges this anthology of thematically and stylistically diverse plays will prove an invaluable resource.
Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000: The Destined Livery
by Roberta BarkerUsing nine recent theatrical and cinematic productions as case studies, it considers the productive contradictions and tensions that occur when contemporary actors perform the gender norms of previous cultures. It will be of interest to theatre practitioners as well as to students of early modern drama, of performance, and of gender studies.
The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama
by Simon Barker Hilary HindsThis anthology offers a full introduction to Renaissance theatre in its historical and political context, along with newly edited and thoroughly annotated texts of the following plays:* The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd)* Arden of Faversham (Anon.)* Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)* A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood)* The Tragedy of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary)* The Masque of Blackness (Ben Jonson)* The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont)* Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (Ben Jonson)* The Roaring Girl (Thomas Middleton & Thomas Dekker)* The Changeling (Thomas Middleton & William Rowley)* 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (John Ford).Each play is prefaced by an introductory headnote discussing the thematic focus of the play and its textual history, and is cross-referenced to other plays of the period that relate thematically and generically.An accompanying website contains a wide selection of contextual documents which supplement the anthology: www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415187346
The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama
by Simon Barker Hilary HindsThis anthology offers a full introduction to Renaissance theatre in its historical and political context, along with newly edited and thoroughly annotated texts of the following plays:* The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd)* Arden of Faversham (Anon.)* Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)* A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood)* The Tragedy of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary)* The Masque of Blackness (Ben Jonson)* The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont)* Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (Ben Jonson)* The Roaring Girl (Thomas Middleton & Thomas Dekker)* The Changeling (Thomas Middleton & William Rowley)* 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (John Ford).Each play is prefaced by an introductory headnote discussing the thematic focus of the play and its textual history, and is cross-referenced to other plays of the period that relate thematically and generically.An accompanying website contains a wide selection of contextual documents which supplement the anthology: www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415187346