“Beauty is a thing
seized on a landing
While ugliness is
halfway up the stairs.”
Howard Barker, Dead
Hands
For most of the last
three decades,
Howard Barker has been Britain’s greatest living dramatist. Over
the fifty years since his first radioplay, Barker has produced a body
of work both wide and deep, ranging over poetry, drama, film,
painting, and criticism. Whenever possible, he does his own lighting,
costume design, sound design, and directs his own work, and despite
the breadth of his talents, he manages to be extraordinarily
prolific. To date, he has written sixty-three plays, two marionette
plays, eleven teleplays, six books of poetry, an opera, and three
collections of writings on theatre, in addition to numerous radio
plays, short film scripts, and paintings. Still - prolificity alone
does not make a writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. In this essay, I’ll
be examining what makes Barker unique as a playwright and poet, and
making the argument that he should be the next Nobel laureate for
literature.
One of the most
immediate ways in which Howard Barker stands out from the rest of
British theatre is his refusal of realism. Of course, there are other
playwrights who set their plays somewhere other than the world we
know, like Bryony Lavery or Howard Brenton, but most of the time
those plays are still grounded in the principles of realism - the
characters talk and act in much the same way that you or I would talk
and act in their situation, and the setting is often a slightly
altered version of our reality. Barker takes it a step further,
setting each of his plays in its own self-contained universe, that
does not necessarily behave according to real-world logic. His
masterpiece Found In The Ground, which deals with the
collective trauma of World War Two, is perhaps the finest example of
this. The play works on a kind of associative, impressionistic level.
The audience is presented with dogs on wheels, a headless woman who
“perambulates” across the stage, a man who ritually
consumes the ashes of famous Nazis (although not Hitler - “We
never serve him here”) and is asked to draw their own
conclusions about the meaning of it all.
I Want to say
Without temper
If possible
without the least
sense of the heroic
Without even the
measured ambition
to speak the truth
which is only
another vulgarity
To say
I am not what I was
Indeed
I was nothing
and now I am at
least the possibility
of
something
and
this
I
will defend
Barker is, as one
Guardian piece put it, “a champion of imagination, not
‘relevance’”
- that is, he does not concern himself with passing comment on the
issues of the day. Rather, Barker’s plays attempt to imagine what
does not exist - to explore the possibilities of human
behaviour. In particular, Barker returns over and over again to the
theme of the perverse, in Poe’s sense of the term, to characters
who do the wrong thing. Barker’s characters are driven to rebel -
against society, against those who presume to judge them, even
against their own moral codes - by overwhelming desires.
Barker did not name
The Wrestling School - the theatre company dedicated to performing
his plays - but its name is appropriate. Barker’s characters are
constantly at war with themselves, torn between what is expected of
them (and often, what is beneficial for them) and what they are
driven towards. Barker’s conception of desire - both sexual and
otherwise - is of a force both destructive and revelatory. His
characters’ decisions often condemn them to suffering - and they
are usually aware of this when they make their choices - but no other
course of action would allow them to maintain their integrity.
Rather than seeking
material advantage, or some other motive common to conventional
drama, Barker’s characters are driven towards ecstasy. That word -
with its connotations both religious and sexual - is key to any
understanding of Barker’s art of theatre. The ecstasy Barker’s
characters endure is the culmination of their desires, but it is also
destructive, both to the characters themselves and on a personal
level. Ecstasy in Barker’s work is a force of social disruption -
something whose nature consists of the violent assertion of
individuality in opposition to the group.
Another important
aspect of Barker’s work is his approach to writing dialogue. Since
his dramatic career shift in the mid-eighties (which I’ll cover
another time, if you want to read about it), Howard Barker has
eschewed conventionally “realistic” dialogue in favour of his own
brand of grandly expressive, poetic speech. Barker has spoken of
seeing Edward Bond’s play Saved, and of being offended by
the inarticulacy of Bond’s working class characters. Barker - who
grew up in a similar area to where the play is set - resolved to give
his characters the same facility for language that he saw in the
people he knew. As his career went on, however, his approach to this
task changed. In his earlier, more social realist plays, Barker
writes dialogue much like any other playwright of the era, but after
his dramatic artistic shift in the eighties, he began to have his
characters speak more in the register of poetry. Poetry, after all,
is the art form which explores to the greatest extent language’s
capacity for meaning, so it makes sense that Barker would merge his
dramatic and poetic voices in the way that he has done.
Barker’s characters
speak in a kind of free verse, reminiscent of the linguistic
vortography of The Waste Land. They interrupt themselves
mid-sentence; they pause like a poet would pause when reading; there
are sudden eruptions of expression, as though characters’ deeper
selves are forcing their way to the surface. The words demand to be
heard; the characters often seem appalled by the truth that they
reveal, frightened by their own eloquence.
As important as what
the characters say is how they say it. In the jagged line breaks and
shattered phrases of his dialogue, Barker creates a language that
matches the chaotic and unstable environment of his stories. His
language is one of extremes, both in content and delivery, and is so
unlike anything else on stage today that Barkerian actors have had to
develop a style of acting unique to his material. If you go to see a
Barker play put on by the Wrestling School, or Lurking Truth, you
will be presented with a company of actors struggling to give
expression to works that defy the rules that much theatrical practice
is based on. This struggle is not due to a lack of ability - both
those companies are full of phenomenally talented actors - but rather
to the demands that Barker places upon anyone involved in producing
his work. His writing requires actors to push the limits of their
abilities. His stage directions are often deliberately vague or
difficult to express onstage (“an effect of light and sound,” “a
grief passes between them”) and this contributes to a sense that
these actors are fighting with the limitations of their art, just as
Barker’s words struggle against the limitations of language.
More than his facility
for language or the uniqueness of his plots, what makes Barker
important - important enough to be a worthy candidate for the Nobel -
is his profound and defiant uselessness. Barker’s work refuses to
educate or edify; he does not intend to spur social change, or give
the audience a glimpse into the lives of their neighbours; his plays
are no more useful to society than the sphinx or the Mona Lisa.
Barker’s philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the cult of
practicality that demands all art serve some social function - he
creates great plays that are designed simply to be great plays. In a
culture paralysed by the market, by the belief that nothing should
exist unless it can give a financial return on investment, Barker -
amoral, poetic, challenging, obscure Barker - is the necessary shock
to the system.
In conclusion, British
drama has no-one like Barker. The continent has produced a few who can
claim to be as original as him, to challenge the boundaries of
theatre the way he does (Handke, Muller, Grotowski of course) but the
English-speaking world has no-one who can touch him. His poetry is of
exceptional quality, and he brings his keen poetic ear to his plays;
the phrase, the conjunction of words, is the basic unit of all
aesthetic language, and Barker is the master of the phrase. Not only
is he unmatched in terms of the quality of his work, but he is a
unique and underappreciated artist who deserves to be brought to
wider attention.
