Special Section:

Howard Barker

Access to the Body

The Theatre of Revelation in Beckett, Foreman, and Barker

Page II

As the name of his theatre suggests, Foreman’s primary concern is the nature of reality as constructed by a subject, particularly within the context of emotional, physical, and psychological extremity. His project is to introduce, through the bodies onstage and his own gnomic, lyrical language, a fracture between the world inside and the world outside the theatre. Seemingly hermetic, Foreman’s work also has a cultural dimension that he does not disclaim:

My plays are an attempt to suggest through example that you can break open the interpretations of life that simplify and suppress the infinite range of inner human energies. [...] The strategies I use are meant to release the impulse from the straitjacket tailored for it by our society. Character, empathy, narrative—these are all straitjackets imposed on the impulse so it can be dressed up in a fashion that is familiar, comforting, and reassuring for the spectator. But I want a theater that frustrates our habitual way of seeing, and by so doing, frees the impulse from the objects in our culture to which it is invariably linked. [...] It’s impulse that’s primary, not the object we’ve been trained to fix it upon. It is the impulse that is your deep truth, not the object that seems to call it forth. The impulse is the vibrating, lively thing that you really are. And that is what I want to return to: the very thing you really are.(7)

If Beckett theorizes the body as a site of expressed suffering, Foreman restores to the experiencing body a creative and imaginative function. The body-as-object, as a physical thing to be contemplated in Beckett’s work, reacquires a consciousness that reconstructs and, more important, can act upon the world that surrounds it. A case in point is Foreman’s 2003 play Panic! (How to Be Happy!), in which four characters, two men and two women, find themselves in a forbidding natural landscape as they attempt to scale a mountain.(8) Three of the characters hopelessly hurl themselves against the given landscape with little success; only one, a woman given to physical stillness, is granted any sort of peace, a peace generated not from understanding but from an ability to reconcieve her surroundings. Her body is just as real, just as challenging an object, as the given mountain. We can take the mountain as a metaphor for the theatrical work itself (and why not, given the perspectival freedom that Foreman seeks to encourage in his audiences?). The ordeal of the Beckettian body leads to the imaginative freedom of Foreman’s female bodies:

The artistic experience must be an ordeal to be undergone. The rhythms must be in a certain way difficult and uncongenial. Uncongenial elements are then redeemed by a clarity in the moment-to-moment, smallest unit of progression. [...] But CLARITY is so difficult in the smallest steps from one moment to the next, because on the miniscule level, clarity is muddled either by the “logic” or progression (which is really a form of sleepwalking) or by the predictability of the opposite choice—the surreal-absurdist choice of the arbitrary & accidental & haphazard step.
Of course
     ORDEAL
is the only experience that remains. And clarity is the mode in which the ordeal becomes ecstatic.(9)

This experience of ordeal is shared by the character with an individual auditor or spectator, a specifically theatrical experience that confronts the performing body with the perceiving body, the object with the subject. It is necessarily a challenge. In Foreman’s theatre the challenge is presented by the performer exhibiting his or her body as a site of imaginative speculation, inviting the audience to share in that imaginative journey, not knowing its outcome. Foreman writes:

Only one theatrical problem exists now: How to create a stage performance in which the spectator experiences the danger of art not as involvement or risk or excitement, not as something that reaches out to vulnerable areas of his person,
     but rather
the danger as a possible decision he (spectator) may make upon the occasion of confronting the work of art. The work of art as a contest between object (or process) and viewer.(10)

The performer’s body, as well as the spectator’s, remains inviolate—the work of art does not “reach out to vulnerable areas of [the] person,” but invites speculation that the process of perceiving the work of art itself originates.

Foreman’s theatrical project restores to Beckett’s bodies under siege the individual’s ability to imaginatively remake the world and the culture that has led to this siege, and simultaneously redefines comic possibilities of theatrical form. In his three mid-career plays that inaugurated his Theatre of Catastrophe, Victory, The Castle, and The Europeans, Howard Barker explores the same imaginative remaking of the body in the world, this time however restoring to it a tragic consciousness, perhaps more Europeanized, it could be said, than Foreman’s brighter, more optimistic American perspective. Indeed, these three plays arguably form a tragic trilogy of the European body, specifically the female body (and it must be noted that of the three dramatists of whom I speak today, the female body is far more central to their work than the male: females are protagonists in most of Beckett’s work for solo performers and Foreman’s character Rhoda led the casts of nearly all of his early and mid-career work). At the same time, Barker’s characters find in confronting and performing their suffering a path to reconstitution and freedom.

In Victory, the first of these three plays, the reconstruction of the human body is the explicit subject matter of the play.(11) Bradshaw roams Restoration England in an attempt to collect the body parts of her late husband, a Republican who is arrested, tortured, and finally decapitated by the King’s soldiers in the final days before the Restoration. For Scrope, her husband’s assistant, this journey is a mere act of mourning for a death, but for Bradshaw herself it is this and more: the reconstruction of her husband’s dead body leads to a reconstruction of her own living identity. Indeed, by the end of the play, she has the justified audacity to physically lash out at Milton, an exemplar of the Republican ideology.

The risks are greater in The Castle. In the aftermath of a war, male soldiers return home to find that women have created a matriarchy based in compassion and collectivity, a situation that Stucley responds to with the construction of an impossible fortification against the natural world itself. The architect Krak is associated by Barker with an expertise in rectilinear engineering and defense. Rationality and hierarchy are specifically male interests in this play. Krak’s rectilinear imagination is threatened when he falls in love with Ann, Stucley’s wife, whose very body has introduced chaos into his own expertise. “Where’s cunt’s geometry?” he exclaims. “The thing has got no angles! And no measure, neither width nor depth, how can you trust what has no measurements?”(12) Nonetheless he has become obsessed, and the obsession is a threat to the continued stability and construction of the castle. As David Ian Rabey notes in his discussion of the play:

Krak is engulfed in new drawings, shunning calculation of angles, bending himself to pursue new form: “Drawn cunt [...] In 27 versions.” Even Stucley is swayed momentarily from his course: “The representation of that thing is not encouraged by the church. [...] It’s wrong, surely, that— [...] I have never looked at one before.” This recalls the [...] authoritarian tendency to separate, designate something a polar opposite and then to proceed in denial of confronting its existence, inevitably [producing] the counter-pressure of upheaval, making war necessary.(13)

Of the women in the play, the witch Skinner bears the suffering of genital mutilation and torture, finally condemned to have the rotting corpse of Holiday, whom she has killed, tied to her own body for the rest of her natural life. In this grotesque bonding of dead body to mutilated body, however, “Skinner finds a strength and freedom,” Rabey says. “Placed outside the community and normal boundaries of human experience, she is free of desire for Ann, recognizes her vanity and rediscovers an autonomy, if only to accept punishment and remain where she pleases, claiming, ‘I belong here. I am the castle also.’”(14)

It is simplistic to say that Barker’s women “embrace” bodily suffering, despite this explicit embrace of death and life in Skinner’s punishment. Instead, as for Beckett’s and Foreman’s women, this suffering—often associated with the marginal status of women in a paternalistic and authoritarian society, whether it’s the seventeenth or the twentieth century—offers an avenue to imaginative autonomy and freedom. Skinner finds it in a newly acquired wit and individuality. What makes this treatment tragic, however, is that there is ultimately no sure redemption in freedom or autonomy. Skinner’s condition is a condition of recognition, not reconciliation. Beckett’s heroines may be left to their status as objects trapped within memory or trauma, Foreman’s find themselves somehow redeemed and encouraged. Neither is the case with Barker’s speaking bodies.

Even the possibility of love as experienced by Katrin in The Europeans is not necessarily redemptive—though love provides new possibilities and new imaginative worlds, it does not for that reason redeem tragic experience.(15) In large part this lies at the heart of Barker’s conception of tragedy. Katrin is the most theatrical of the female protagonists in these three plays, self-consciously exhibiting herself in childbirth in the public square, an exhibition which attracts Starhemburg, her future lover, to her. Read, again, as a metaphor for the theatrical experience itself, the co-optation of Katrin’s exhibition by Leopold when he names the child (who is a product of Katrin’s rape by the Turks) Concilia, a co-optation of the imaginative offering Katrin makes to her audience. Her child can become a property of the state if she herself cannot. It is her own suffering physical body to which Katrin ultimately lays claim even in the trauma of the abandonment of the child at the end of the play. This suffering, and the new imaginative freedom it has engendered, is beyond Leopold’s and the culture’s reach. In her suffering is no reconciliation or redemption, but there is in it a freedom from the authoritarian state, and finally a freedom to love.

This alternative theatrical tradition reunites the two halves of the Cartesian human being, joining body to spirit once again. And it was from a rejection of this Cartesian thought that Beckett’s work most notoriously sprang. In one of his final plays, Beckett took on the theatre itself—not merely as metaphor but as explicit subject matter. A theatre director and his assistant arrange the body of an aged, pale, voiceless man for public exhibition. The director and his assistant are busy, crude, and self-important; the director is in a hurry for he has a meeting to attend (what’s more, a government meeting: “Step on it, I have a caucus,” he exclaims).(16) But the body around which they scurry remains, at center stage, raising its head only at the very end to stare the applauding audience in the face. The applause stops; the man keeps staring, though he remains silent. Barker and Foreman’s project is to re-equip this suffering body with a voice and movement, to start out from this individual human body without which there can be no theatre whatsoever. Beckett’s play Catastrophe came at the close of his career, though it comes as an opening to a new theatre for the next century.

© George Hunka—Nietzsche Circle, 2010

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010)

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