Download or read book Death the One and the Art of Theatre written by Howard Barker and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest collection of Barker's philosophical musings on theatre, this volume includes speculations, deductions, prose poems & poetic apercus, which cast a unique light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, love & theatre.
Download or read book Arguments for a Theatre written by Howard Barker and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Barker, author of over thirty plays, has long been an implacable foe of the liberal British establishment, and champion of radical theatre world-wide. His best-known plays include The Castle, Scenes from an Execution and The Possibilities. All of his plays are emotionally highly charged, intellectually stimulating and far removed from 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. 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 for Barker's own 'Theatre of Catastrophe'.
Download or read book The Theatre of Howard Barker written by Charles Lamb and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including new interviews, a revised introduction, an updated bibliography and a full production chronology, this second, fully revised edition of an acclaimed study sets out to make emotional sense of Barker's characters and their interactions.
Download or read book Scenes from an Execution written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commissioned 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
Download or read book Howard Barker s art of theatre written by David I Rabey and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial and provocative multi-media artist. Beyond his internationally performed and acclaimed theatrical productions, and his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, he is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist cognisant of the unique power of art to provoke moral speculation, and of the distinctive theatricality of the human being in times of crisis. This collection of essays provides international perspectives on the full range of Barker’s achievements, theatrical and otherwise, and argues for their unique importance and urgency at the forefront of several genres of provocative modern art. It includes an interview with the artist and an essay by Barker himself.
Download or read book Barker Plays Three written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the plays Claw, Ursula, He Stumbled and The Love of a Good Man The plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw, a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its terrible conclusion marked the debut of a vivid dramatic imagination. In Ursula Barker's engagement with the pains of the past, and his way of reinvigorating ancient arguments reaches a high point in his treatment of the legend of St Ursula and the martyrdom of 11,000 virgins, where the virtues of celibacy and marriage are set against the catastrophic passion of a woman described as a 'perfect liar'. Barker's scrutiny of the body and its complex meanings is never more intense than in He Stumbled, the tragedy of a celebrated anatomist whose last dissection becomes his own. The body as a site of political and personal investment is also at the heart of The Love of a Good Man, an early work set on the empty battlefields of the Great War, where the burial of the dead becomes a pretext for private ambition as well as national grief.
Download or read book Howard Barker Plays Twelve written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 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.
Download or read book Howard Barker Plays Two written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes 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.
Download or read book Barker Plays Five written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Howard Barker Plays Eleven written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 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.
Download or read book The Theatre of Howard Barker written by Steve Nicholson and published by Methuen Drama. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Barker is widely recognised as one of the most important playwrights of contemporary European theatre, and remains the only living UK playwright to have a company devoted exclusively to his work. This companion begins with an overview of Barker's long career to date, identifying key themes, approaches and features of his work. It examines Barker's major plays written and performed between 1983 and 2012 in detail, considering the plays as performance texts, with discussions of productions, staging and their critical reception. Barker's extensive writing on his own work is reviewed and the book features critical perspectives from a number of individuals who have worked as director, actor or designer on his work.
Download or read book Lot and His God written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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...
Download or read book Howard Barker Plays Ten written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tenth 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. In Ahno, A Prince of Now, a youthful dictator is revealed as simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary, in politics and in love. His shocking efforts to create a new social order are mirrored in his unconventional passion for a seventy-five year old woman, who along with his devoted commissar, a group of fanatical priests, and a disturbingly perceptive Dalmatian, make up a menacing court of activists. In Exquisite, Barker's theme is the ethical ambiguity of slavery. In a dimly feudal setting, but constantly referring to our time, unsolved murders decimate a stable community. The protagonist, a loyal and uncritical serf, declines to speculate on the cause, whilst at the same time possessing the power to put an end to it. His ambiguous relationship with authority, and his refusal to quarrel with his own status, reveals Barker's heretical manner with moral platitudes. Alongside full-scale and even epic dramas, Barker has always written short works for small casts. In Distance he views the horrors of The Great War from an unusual perspective, that of the mother of a killed son, who arrives at her own philosophy of mourning. In Irrespective, a reclusive intellectual – in his final years – finds himself pestered for moral teaching by a wretched populace which has hitherto ignored him. In Critique of Pure Feeling, an old woman, sceptical of love but not of property, finds herself recklessly participating in an erotic duel. Immense Kiss, one of Barker's most terrible visions, takes place as an army enters a besieged city, where a young conscript, discovering a woman abandoned in a room, finds himself stretched between longing and civility.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature written by Richard Bradford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.
Download or read book Victory written by Howard Barker and published by Calder Publications Limited. This book was released on 1983 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Barker Plays Four written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the plays I Saw Myself, The Dying of Today, Found in the Ground and The Road, the House, the Road Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand her compulsion to transgress the laws of her society comes into collision with the conventions of an art form. In the weaving of a tapestry Barker's13th century heroine privileges private life over public responsibility. If she is cruelly punished she is also granted self-awareness. A critical moment in social decay is also at the centre of The Dying of Today, in which a stranger who luxuriates in the telling of bad news observes the effects of his devastating narrative on a humble barber. The barber's recovery from pain, and the beauty of his sensibility, bring the two strangers into an emotional proximity. Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground, a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his wayward daughter's struggle to make meaning from the atrocities of the 20th century. The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in The Road, the House, the Road. Erasmus' obscure colleague Aventinus was found dead on a wintry road. How he arrived at his solitary death forms the subject of this speculation on scholarship, mischief and the murderer's vocation.
Download or read book Theatre of Catastrophe written by Karoline Gritzner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen essays on the style, language and vision of one of Britain’s most influential and controversial playwrights. Focusing on different aspects of what Barker has called the Theatre of Catastrophe, an international range of academics offer illuminating interpretations of his work. Includes analyses of the political, moral and historical aspects of his writing, its poetry and eroticism, its depiction of the figure of the artist, and Barker’s writing in performance. Includes contributions from Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Mary Karen Dahl, Helen Iball, Christine Kiehl, Charles Lamb, Chris Megson, Roger Owen, Dan Rebellato, James Reynolds, Elizabeth Sakellaridou, Andy Smith, Liz Tomlin, Heiner Zimmerman.
