Howard Barker: Polemic Theory and Dramatic Practice. Nietzsche, Metatheatre, and the Play The Europeans

Howard Barker: Polemic Theory and Dramatic Practice. Nietzsche, Metatheatre, and the Play The Europeans DAVID BARNETT It is surprising to find how little has been written by scholars on the prolific dramatist Howard Barker, and this situation may reflect the theatre's general failure to engage practically with his work. In many ways, Barker is a lone voice on the British scene - his theatre makes demands on both actor and audience because of its anti-psychological, non-linear, and morally unstable dramaturgies. A main point of contact for those interested in Barker but unable to see a performance live can, of course, be found in print. In addition to the many plays that have been published, a volume of essays and dialogues first appeared in 1989; Argumentsfor a Theatre' is now in its third edition, and some of its essays are included in recent anthologies of dramatic theory.' It should be noted that Arguments for a Theatre does not contain Barker's "theory" of theatre; the book is too peripatetic and unsystematic for that. Rather, it offers a collection of meditations that are theoretical insofar as they mainly muse on drama and theatre in the abstract. with occasional reference to his own dramatic writing. It would do Barker a disservice to suggest that he is a dramatic theorist or philosopher rather than a dramatist, but ArgumelJts does articulate Barker's critique of the contemporary stage and his visions for its future. In this essay I will interrogate the cleavage between Howard Barker's "theory" and his practice of writing plays, with reference to Arguments and to his play The Europeans: Struggles to Love. In the conclusion, I shall also note the recurrence and development of devices used in The Europeans in othel Barker plays to extend my argument beyond a single text. The article trains its attention on the contradiction between the central role of Nietzsche in the writings and a more relativized treatment of Nietzschean thought in the selfconscious , metatheatrical world of the drama. lt is surprising that more is not made of Barker'S relationship to Nietzsche in the admilledly small corpus of secondary literature. David Ian Rabey briefly Modem Drama, 44:4 (2001) 458 Nietzsche, Mctatheatrc, and Barker's The Europeans 459 links the play Victory with the philosopher and quotes the "Barker actor" [an McDiarmid on Barker as a "tragic artist" in the Nietzschean mold (Howard Barker 139, 286). [n his afterword to Arguments, Rabey calls Barker an "aesthetic·existentialist theorist who dares to match the disturbing power of Wilde, Nietzsche and Sartre" (229), but he does not elaborate upon this assertion. Nietzsche makes no appearance in the other book-length study of Barker, Charles Lamb's Howard Barker's Theatre of Seduction. Yet Arguments amply demonstrates Barker's theoretical adoption of the philosopher. Barker never refers to Nietzsche by name, but his spirit clearly lives on in Arguments. The focal point for his invocation is Barker'S continued exhortation of tragedy as "the greatest of all forms" (172). The term is mentioned in almost every essay and dialogue in the volume, and tragedy is identified as agenre that resists the restricting nature ofideoiogies, politics. and social conventions because of its links to irrationality and desire. In a critique of catharsis, a socia-moral synthesis repudiated in the dramas, Barker says, "Aristotle attempted to create an aesthetic which placed tragedy safely within the bounds of social regulation [...J. It is the private, the occluded, to which it addresses its disruptive powers" (Arguments 173). Barker brings the tragic idea to its logical conclusion: pain must not be allowed to be neutralized by sham solutions that merely pretend it does not persist. "Cruelty" is mentioned on several occasions (78, 90, 122), a term that, again, leads us back to Nietzsche (via Artaud). Artaud's assertion that "[eJverything that acts is cruelty" (65) is based upon Nietzsche's tragic relation: the notion of a cruelty that transcends "the sadistic" is located within Nietzsche's tragic view of humanity as formulated by the poles of the Apolline and the Dionysiac. Their articulation in The Birth ofTragedy out of the Spirit ofMusic has had seminal influence not only on the study...