Howard Barker: Politics and Desire, an expository study of his drama and poetry, 1969-87 by David Ian Rabey (review)

454 Book Reviews youth - about whom much has been speculated. Just as this collection contains a wide variety of essays, it will appeal to a wide variety of readers - students, scholars, actors. and, I would add. anyone seriously interested in contemporary culture. LOiS GORDON, FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY DAVID IAN RABEY. Howard Barker: Politics and Desire, an expository study of his drama and poetry. 1969-87. London: Macmillan 1989. pp. 298. £35. In 1985 the Royal Shakespeare Company presented a Howard Barker season at the Barbican's Pit Theatre. It was a recognition of the presence in contemporary drama of a writerofhigh calibre whose works possess undeniable originality and intelligence. Yet Barker's plays are not as widely produced and known as he and his adherents might wish; a neglect due, probably, to their perceived difficulty and unpalatability. David Rabey demonstrates his devotion to Barker's cause in this book by his examination of the long list ofplays, from 1969 onward, and exposition of the ideas he sees there. Rabey places the book very close to his subject: Barker statements, some taken in interview, feed into an expository discussion in which the plays form an intense area offoreground. There is so little depth of perspective, so little background, that references outward to othercontemporary playwrights, Edward Bond. for instance, strike the reader as breaches of the book's own decorum. At the conclusion Rabey provides a set of conversations with actors involved in productions of Barker. including Maggie Steed and Ian McDiannid. articulate supponers of Barker who express their ideas so clearly that Rabey himself appear~ in comparison as afflicted with academic afflatus. unwilling to say the simple thing. He has perhaps taken this over from Barker who, as playwright to the intelligentsia, refuses to offer stories permitting easy identifications between audience and stage. The closeness of the book to the subject. in these different ways, does not provide the help it might The theatre talk is insufficiently grounded to provide an approach through the productions. As for ideas, while Barker's statements are presented and repeated in paraphrase, they are essentially unchallenged and this contributes to 8 sense ofinadequate examination and judgment, felt also in the rawness of the expository treatment: as the book pursues its chronological course it conceals any distinctions to be made between major and minor work. But this is perhaps to anticipate other books. Looking at this one, a strong feature on the positive side lies in Rabey's sense of the vitality, temper and subject-matter of the plays, an awareness crucial to a study of Barker. Politics and desire, Rabey's chosen sub-title, puts its finger on the subject-matter: the drives of the political mind and the se'xual body. The commingling of these two forms of passion in his work has given Barker a reputation as a modem "Jacobean." When the Royal Coun Theatre commissioned him to prepare a new adaptation of Middleton's Women Beware Women in 1986 he appeared a natural choice. Barker touched a nerve in the audience with that production through his development of Middleton's Sordido into Book Reviews 455 a revenge figure, a street malcontent of Thatcherite Britain who carries out a rape, a saving rape we are given to understand, on the spoiled and treacherous young beauty of the play. Bianca, who has opted for success through the personal and poiiticallie of a state wedding. She learns that she has been playing with fire, or more precisely with male sexual force, an adjunct ofpolitical power. This piece of action most certainly represents a ruthless joining of politics and desire and one evidently designed also as a comment on the royal weddings of the eighties in Britain. It is an action which could explain Rabey's suggestion that Barker's writing follows the lines ofArtaud's proposed Theatre ofCruelty and seeks to fulfill the call for a theatre built "on a concept of drastic action pushed to the limit." Many such instances of "pushes to the limit" come to mind. Barker's feminist fable The Castle (1985) shows us Skinner, a man-hating witch, lugging the corpse of a jovial, sex-loving, construction foreman around on...