Special Section:

Howard Barker

The Sunless Garden of the Unconsoled

Some Destinations Beyond Catastrophe

by Howard Barker

Introduction

An Invitation to Barker's Garden

by David Kilpatrick

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 Howard Barker, David Kilpatrick, and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

The question concerning tragedy has been a major concern for Modernism since Nietzsche. Whether or not the art form is possible in such an age has been the subject of much debate. No writer has done more to answer the call than Howard Barker. Born in south London in 1946, his first play was staged at the Royal Court in 1970 when, along with Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, and David Hare, he was seen as one of a handful of promising young dramatists writing political plays pushing a progressive agenda on the British stage. Unlike his peers, however, Barker hasn’t risen to popularity on either side of the pond, and this is due in no small part to the “difficult” tag frequently used to label his plays by London theatre critics. Despite this resistance, he has gone on to cultivate a body of work that has earned him another reputation: an actor’s playwright. When the stages of the Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company no longer welcomed his writing, in 1988 actors from both companies formed The Wrestling School, a theatre company devoted exclusively to the staging of his plays. By this time his dramaturgy abandoned the ideological and didactic impulse of his earlier work. As critics failed or refused to keep up with this shift, beginning in 1986 Barker took to writing theoretical texts as programme notes, newspaper articles, and lectures, before gathering them together in one volume as Arguments for a Theatre in 1989 (John Calder Press), expanding with subsequent editions in 1993 and 1997 (Manchester UP). Serving to articulate his tragic vision as they elaborate what he calls the “Theatre of Catastrophe,” the volume stands alongside Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double and Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre as the most provocative and influential works on theatre in the twentieth century.

The influence of Barker’s plays and theoretical texts on the “in-yer-face” dramatists who emerged in the mid-1990s “Cool Britannia” scene is inestimable. Dramatists such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Martin Mcdonagh, and Martin Crimp all share with Barker a commitment to theatre as excess, where the aesthetic and ethical limitations of conventional theatre are transgressed as a matter of course. Kane famously predicted that “in two hundred years’ time Howard Barker will be thought of a bit like Shakespeare.” While the works of Kane take their richly deserved place among the modern theatrical canon via anthologies and restaging, Barker’s work remains strangely subject to neglect, with recent cuts in funding to the British Arts Council making the survival of The Wrestling School a concern.

Not that Barker’s output has shown any signs of wear or weakening. His fifteen-hour play The Ecstatic Bible in 2000, his revision of Elsinore and the Hamlet myth with Gertrude -The Cry in 2002, and The Seduction of Almighty God in 2006 prove his tragic vision is as sharp as ever, adding to a body of work that is daunting in its breadth and depth. Likewise, his critical output continues in the new century, with Death, The One and the Art of Theatre appearing in 2005 (Routledge) while adopting the nom-de-plume Eduardo Houth with A Style and its Origins, published in 2007 (Oberon), chronicling in third-person Barker’s cultivation of a unique performative aesthetic with the productions he directed with The Wrestling School.

The following essay, “The Sunless Garden of the Unconsoled: Some Destinations Beyond Catastrophe,” would surely fit should there be a fourth edition of Arguments for a Theatre. Here we see Barker wrestling with tragedy, frustrated with the seeming reification of social values, the turn towards reconciliation and moral conformity that attends—however tenuously—Attic and Elizabethan tragic drama (perhaps, Barker suggests, due to the artist’s need to be patronized if not adored), seeing in such dramaturgy a paradoxical suppression of the catastrophic core of the tragic. Rejecting such gestures as cowardly compromise, Barker here explores his own texts as movements towards “the experience of Sacrifice,” with special attention to Gertrude -The Cry and Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward (in this essay he refers to the latter as unperformed and unpublished but it has just been given a staged reading at Riverside Studios, London, 2 May 2010). Lack of familiarity with either of these scripts by Barker shouldn‘t be a barrier to an understanding of what is at stake here for tragedy and catastrophic thought; Barker’s sacrificial theory of contemporary tragedy would be just as clearly articulated if he discussed plays either canonical or merely imagined. Like the work of Georges Bataille, Barker finds in sacrifice at once the antithesis and the antidote to the modern. The sense of the Sacred such sacrifice produces is one that renders any significatory order not only suspect (as with some works by Sophocles and Shakespeare) but shattered.

With “The Sunless Garden of the Unconsoled” we find an articulation of a theatrical vision more tragic than prior tragedy would allow. With this rejection of the comforts of faith, reason or ethics, Barker dares us to consider a mode of consciousness lost in a night of non-knowledge, inviting us to the ecstasy of irrevocable loss.

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