Arguments for a Theatre, and: Howard Barkers's Theatre of Seduction (review)

Arguments for a Theatre. By Howard Barker. Third edition. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997; pp. 233. $24.95 paper.

Howard Barker's Theatre of Seduction. By Charles Lamb. Contemporary Theatre Studies, vol. 19. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997; pp. xii + 153. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

Of the handful of significant dramatists to emerge from the British political theatre of the 1970s, Howard Barker is perhaps the least well known on this side of the Atlantic. This may be attributed to the fact that his reputation as an actor's playwright is eclipsed by the negative critical reception he consistently receives from the British press, who often dismiss him as an eccentric and elitist nihilist who composes difficult and obscure plays. Barker began writing theoretical texts in 1986 as a response to this critical confusion. The manifestos, aphorisms, and interviews gathered as Arguments for a Theatre together with Charles Lamb's theoretical approach to Barker's plays provide a powerful case against this dismissal.

The third edition of Arguments adds twelve texts written since the second edition. The new expansion is a testament to Barker's continued growth as a writer for and of the theatre in the four years between editions. The range of positions he maintains is reflected in the list of names he gives to his project(s) throughout Arguments: Tragic Theatre, Theatre of Secrets, the Unrecognizable Theatre, Theatre of Obscurity, a theatre of Anti-Parable, Theatre of Infection, and most frequently and definitively, Theatre of Catastrophe. The composite image conveyed via this list of names achieves greater definition through contrast with the names he gives to their antitheses: the Humanist Theatre, Theatre of Conscience, Theatre of Criticism or Critical Theatre, Political Theatre, Populist Theatre, Theatre of Saying, Theatre of Solutions, and the Illuminated Theatre. Barker's list of antagonists includes Aristotle, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Shaw, and Brecht. In other words, he decries the evolution of the writer's role in the Western dramatic tradition, because "in ceasing to be a poet, the dramatist became a playwright, an artisan rather than a visionary" (150).

If it is inappropriate to call Barker a playwright, it is perhaps fitting to use "tragedian." In the (new) preface, he claims that in Arguments, "tragedy . . . is being uttered here, as one might speak a secret curse in the confines of an alien religion" (9). The language initially calls to mind Nietzsche and Artaud, but rather than an orgiastic ritual of communal ek-stasis, Barker attempts to provoke difference in his audience not only to divide them against one another (in sentiment, humor, taste, ideology) but to divide individuals against themselves in the post-ethical ontological insecurity of the catastrophic. This is not to set one opinion against another, for Barker aims to write the play that "is immune to discussion . . . eliminates debate . . . replaces arguments" (75) and, most of all, "makes theatre a necessity" (82).

The problem with contemporary theatre, according to Barker, is that it either serves to entertain or to reify conventional mores. This is why, he suggests, the theatre is no longer threatened with prohibition: it rarely disturbs anymore. Although his first decade's worth of plays would be rightly termed socialist in ideology, his retreat from certitudes has made him an enemy of both the left and right. He opposes the politics of both camps for subscribing to the humanist project, which seeks the "elimination of pain, the elimination of conflict, the prolongation of life" (215). Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe challenges orthodox morality while fulfilling an instinctive need: "men and women ache for the representation of tragedy--which is pain--and this secret longing for the incomprehensible nature of pain--is beyond politics, beyond social order, and beyond conscience" (146).

Needless to say, such a conception of theatre places unique demands upon the actor, who he claims is "not entirely human" (75). Barker writes for "the actor who is unafraid of tragedy, lives at the expense...