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  • Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker
  • Adrian Curtin
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker. Edited by Karoline Gritzner and David Ian Rabey . London: Oberon Press, 2006; pp. 240. $29.95 paper.

This collection of fourteen essays and an interview with Howard Barker is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on the contemporary British dramatist, director, and theatre theorist, who is now in his sixtieth year and has some ninety plays to his credit. The contributors to this volume, many of whom have previously written on Barker's work and cite from personal correspondence with the author, approach Barker's "theatre of catastrophe" from the vantage points of content, style, theory, aesthetics, dramaturgy, production, reception, and influence, and offer useful insights into Barker's compelling—though thorny—body of work.

The focus of this collection is on investigating Barker's self-styled theatre of catastrophe and his recurrent themes of sexuality, desire, ecstasy, individual will, criminality, performance, and death. Barker's plays pose significant interpretive challenges for spectators and critics alike, and by and large the contributors to this collection elaborate on these complexities but do not reduce them. The scholars draw on an impressive array of theorists and philosophers to situate and analyze Barker's theatre and theory, including Kristeva, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Lyotard, Adorno, Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, and Levinas, and they observe how Barker's plays explicate theoretical concepts (e.g., Kristeva's concept of the abject, Bataille's writings on death, and so on) and vice versa.

Despite the plethora of theories and theorists upon which these scholars draw, there is a remarkable consistency to their readings of the theatre of catastrophe—readings that are oftentimes in line with those set out by Barker himself. Divergences from Barker's own theoretical writings are therefore of particular interest. Liz Tomlin sounds a note of scholarly disagreement in her essay in which she analyzes Barker's form of tragedy, with special reference to Nietzsche's artist-tyrant figures, and offers an important caveat to the theory of seduction in Barker's theatre, as argued by Charles Lamb (also a contributor to this volume). Tomlin, reading Barker "against the grain" as it were, reminds us that his tragic protagonists inevitably do harm to unwitting subjects in the course of their narratives of self-determination; this complicates Lamb's analysis (in The Theatre of Howard Barker [2005]) in which (following Barker) the seductive power relations among Barker's tragic protagonists is privileged. Barker's plays pose real challenges to our moral perceptions, Tomlin writes; they suggest that cruelty has always been a necessary component of the tragic will to self-knowledge and that death has always been its desired outcome.

Mary Karen Dahl and Elizabeth Angel-Perez also probe Barker's moral speculation in their respective essays and conclude, somewhat surprisingly, that Barker's theatre of catastrophe may be thought to have an ethical dimension, despite Barker's rhetoric to the contrary. Dahl, examining Barker's treatment of rape and torture, suggests that "[Barker] demands ethical thought by questioning the complicity of artists and spectators alike in appropriating the pain of others to their own ends [ . . . ]. To generate disturbances that contribute to undermining institutionalised power relations and enable citizens to experience and rehearse their freedom differently, Barker stages deeply painful acts" (96). Likewise, Angel-Perez writes: "Barker's theatre is the theatre of a moral activist who paradoxically discards all set morals: it shapes a new language that exposes the inhumanity of man without trying to collapse the oxymoron, a new language that reveals that humanity builds itself out of inhumanity [ . . . ], what Auschwitz has horrendously compelled us to realise and which is confirmed by the genocidal episodes of recent history" (137). [End Page 146]

I suspect that Barker would reject these efforts to inscribe an ethics (however revolutionized) for his theatre of catastrophe, but the responses of Dahl and Angel-Perez are valid nonetheless. They remind us of the multiplicity of responses that Barker's theatre may engender as well as the continued importance of Barker's explorations of states of extremity—particularly given post-9/11 global politics, as David Ian Rabey suggests in...

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