Howard Barker: Modern Allegorist

Howard Barker: Modem Allegorist ALAN THOMAS Howard Barker is one of that notable generation of leftist writers including Howard Brenton and David Hare, whose work first carne to prominence in Britain in the nineteen-seventies. Inevitably, he became known by association as a political dramatist and his own stated leftism in political attitude has tended to reinforce this description. Yet the broad application of the term "political" conceals the nature of the highly individual work of a dramatist whose plays, notably in his later period, have been visionary in concept, often surrealist in manner, and so frequently bewildering to the critics as to demand analysis and definition. Over the last two decades Barker's plays have enjoyed productions in some of the more prestigious playing-spaces in the provinces and London (though sometimes on stages allotted to the experimental or coterie play). His career began at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, with Stripwell, in 1970, and that connection has been maintained, with the theatre's main stage being the site of the first London productions of a number of his plays, including Claw (1975), Victory (1983, performed by the Joint Stock Theatre Company), Women Beware Women (1986) and Seven Lears (1990). This last was performed by The Wrestling School, a company now presenting Barker plays in an association with Sheffield's Crucible and the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. Barker has also enjoyed a useful relationship with the Royal Shakespeare Company which has staged several productions and readings of his work at their Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden and later at their London quarters at the Barbican. The RSC put on a season of his plays at the Pit Theatre in 1985 (the occasion of the premiere of The Castle) and in 1988 mounted the first production of The Bite of the Night. Through these years Barker has been steadily productive. John Calder, his publishers, list twenty-eight stage plays including the television play Pity in History, and an award-winning radio play Scenes from 011 Execution, which was adapted for a stage production in 1990 at the Almeida Theatre with Glenda Jackson Modem Drama, 35 (1992) 433 434 ALAN THOMAS in the leading role of Galactia. While there has been much positive response, the plays do not fit readily into accustomed modes of political drama and have given their author a reputation as difficult, idiosyncratic and perhaps too intense for his own good.' Clearly, there is need for some allemptto grasp the way in which this writer works. In the mid-eighties he found his own term for his work, describing it as Thealre of Catastrophe.' The term could prove helpful, for certainly there has been a need for guidance, but how is the term "Catastrophe" to be read? It is a term appropriate in tone to the big plays of his recent career which touch the disastrous extremes of experience. This extremism of situation probably is more useful as a guide than the kinship implied by the phrase with Artaud's Theatre of Cruelly which, it was proposed, would exert such power on its audiences as to liberate the forces of their sub-conscious. Barker certainly directs himself into areas of human behaviour which challenge the power of reason - one continuing theme being the complexity of human desire. But the struggles appear to be sought as educational experiences for the participants and audiences and further, to be explorations of ideas still in the process of formation, not fully disentangled, clarified and articulated. (There is a touch of automatisme about Barker's writing which he acknowledges .3) Awareness of a struggle toward meaning guides responses to the plays as they unfold, somewhat mysteriously - the audience not being invited immediately to recognise a familiar world, the "real" world, but to enter a world which possesses an internal logic still in process of discovery. Concepts and abstract ideas appear to lie behind and govern the creation of character and events and determine the stories, yet they need reaching for. Such sustained workings-out of envisioned worlds through sets of representative figures and actions is the method of allegory. The term has a creaking, old-fashioned air about it and the mode does...