Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (review)

Howard Barker adds to his body of critical writing on the theatre with this new publication, which builds upon his earlier work, Arguments for a Theatre (1997, 3rd edition), but also deepens and refocuses its concerns. This new text delves into the artistic and metaphysical implications of Barker's self-styled "theatre of catastrophe," which is an avant-garde mode of tragedy. Barker takes the privileged, if somewhat marginalized, position that he occupies in contemporary theatre and turns it to his advantage, writing from outside the social and embracing the dark, obscure world of catastrophe and disrepair that typifies his plays. For, Barker suggests, the relentlessly tragic, oftentimes violent and usually highly sexualized landscape of catastrophe is also the site (or index) of death, which is the principal subject that he courts in his new work.

In Death, The One and the Art of Theatre, Barker composes a dense series of poetic fragments, speculations, and imaginary scenes that sketches the connections of his tripartite enquiry. It is, unsurprisingly, quite a challenging text, forgoing straightforward argument or theorizing in favor of an accretion of ideas and propositions that adumbrates rather than explicates his concerns. The basic outlining of Barker's theatre remains the same, except that he now designates the "theatre of catastrophe" as the "art of theatre," as opposed to the humanist, populist theatre of morals and entertainment, which is simply (and somehow derogatorily) called "the theatre." This renaming has the effect of highlighting the overt artfulness of Barker's theatre, while implying that non-Barkerian theatre—any theatre that favors clarity of meaning over persistent dislocation and anxiety—is debased, and therefore not Art. One might find this binary logic objectionable, but Barker thrives on an oppositional stance, shunning the mainstream and the conventional in order to cultivate the private, if not rejected, space of "authentic" tragedy, or the illegal. Barker's misreading (if it is such) of "the theatre" may be necessary for him to carve out his own niche, but he thinks his provocative, even incendiary, outlook quite valid, likening theatres to religions that annihilate one another in the boldness of their convictions (2).

It is this vital power of tragedy that enables the "art of theatre" to "[steal] utterance from death," making the theatre a privileged place where death is confronted, exalted, and made to divulge its secrets, at least in part (37). Barker maintains that theatre is crucially an art of death because its very artifice makes truth-statements redundant; consequently, it opens up the possibility of broaching death as a metaphysical state, which one can ever only hypothesize. "Theatre is situated on the bank of the Styx (the side of the living). The actually dead cluster at the opposite side, begging to be recognized. What is it they have to tell? Their mouths gape . . ." (20).

The challenge posed by Barker in this text, which is also the challenge of his tragic theatre, is that of admitting death: how does one enter into this domain (if it is a domain) that is entirely alien to our conceptions, and which, because of its assumed negativity, is customarily regarded with fear? Outside the theatre, death is not valued: it is continually deferred in favor of consumption, more life, and the "nauseating reproduction" of the social world (62). The "art of theatre," on the other hand, locates the ideal in death, and makes it a valuable fear, admitting it even into pleasure. It is at this juncture that the third element of Barker's theoretical venture gains importance, which he calls "the one." The one is a name for a lover, but a deadly lover, who brings a potent combination of death and sexual ecstasy to the subject who suffers her (the one is feminized in the text). Barker finds an intimation of death in erotic transaction, derived from "the anxiety that nothing will ever again surpass the unearthly quality of this ecstasy" (43). The formulation of the one is peculiar to Barker's...