London Theatre Blog » Howard Barker

Found in the Ground

Stephe Harrop — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:55:48 +0000

So. There’s a Nuremberg judge burning his library of unread books, while his daughter copulates obsessively with the dying. A faceless, bare-breasted woman stalks across the stage, groaning ‘I am all the Anne Franks’ to the point of absurdity, then tedium. Three mechanical dogs trundle awkwardly about, howling unpersuasively and cluttering up the space. And a sinister chorus line of uniformed nurses march, smirk, titter, and bare their backsides in mindless unison.

Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground is suffused with the furious lassitude which follows the discovery that rote piety is as poisonous a rote evil, that virtue and justice are polluted by the vulgar quotidian they purport to serve, and that neither the desecration nor the fetishisation of great wickedness is any substitute for the thing itself. Arbitrary wickedness is revealed as the only possible route to self-assertion in a world that has degraded all the existing atrocities into tourist attractions, philosophy, or (worse) art. And then Hitler arrives, placidly extolling the virtues and pleasures of long rural rambles.

This production has all the hallmarks of Barker directing Barker: darkness, declamatoriness, unnecessary female nudity and uncompromising cruelty exercised to the point of self-indulgence. The acting company are surreptitiously wonderful, like naughty children scribbling cartoons in the margins of their algebra. The pace is unremittingly funereal.

I personally suspect that Found in the Ground might be more rewarding to read than to watch. Also that it might be more rewarding to watch if directed by someone other than its author. Barker’s comprehensive contempt for spectators whose jejune theatrical tastes run to more than bare breasts and black curtains is conspicuous. A yellow dressing gown glows with rare opulence amid the gloom, while all those burning books emit no more than a wan, sickly seepage of paler darkness.

This is a style of presentation that Barker enthusiasts will recognise, and some will undoubtedly relish. But Found in the Ground isn’t calculated to accommodate the Barker novice, or anyone with a low-ish boredom threshold. So you’ve been warned.

Brecht & Barker

Andrew Eglinton — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 21:15:23 +0000

I was recently going back over some texts on Brecht’s model of Epic theatre and was also reading Howard Barker’s Arguments for a Theatre and in these two passages the similarities are striking. If you are not familiar with the work of Howard Barker, I strongly recommend reading this available passage from his 6-hour epic The Ecstatic Bible and I would also recommend the other texts referenced here too.

From Brecht on Theatre (ed. John Willett, 1974 Methuen: London, p37)

DRAMATIC THEATRE	EPIC THEATRE
plot	narrative
implicates the spectator in a stage situation	turns the spectator into an observer
wears down his capacity for action	arouses his capacity for action
provides him with sensations	forces him to take decisions
experience	picture of the world
the spectator is involved in something	he is made to face something
suggestion	argument
instinctive feelings are preserved	brought to the point of recognition
the spectator is in the thick of it, shares the experience	the spectator stands outside, studies
the human being is taken for granted	the human being is the object of the enquiry
he is unalterable	he is alterable and able to alter
eyes on the finish	eyes on the course
one scene makes another	each scene for itself
growth	montage
linear development	in curves
evolutionary determinism	jumps
man as a fixed point	man as a process
thought determines being	social being determines thought
feeling	reason

From Arguments For a Theatre (Howard Barker, 1989 Manchester University Press: Manchester, p71)

HUMANIST THEATRE	CATASTOPHIC THEATRE
We all really agree.	We only sometimes agree.
When we laugh we are together.	Laughter conceals fear.
Art must be understood.	Art is a problem of understanding.
Wit greases the message.	There is no message.
The actor is a man/woman not	The actor is different in kind.
unlike the author.
The production must be clear.	The audience cannot grasp
	everything; nor could the author.
We celebrate our unity.	We quarrel to love.
The critic is already	The critic must suffer like
The message is important.	The play is important.
The audience is educated	The audience is divided
and goes home	and goes home
happy	disturbed
or	or
fortified.	amazed.

The Ecstatic Bible – Howard Barker

Andrew Eglinton — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 20:51:17 +0000

It’s quite rare that you ever get to read a good-sized excerpt of a published playwright/writer’s work on the Internet, so when I came across the scene ‘Birth’ from Howard Barker’s epic 6-hour play The Ecstatic Bible, I thought I would share it with readers of this blog.

The Ecstatic Bible is a 436 page epic in 30 “chapters”. The six-hour epic premiered at the 2000 Adelaide Festival in a unique co-production between Barker’s own theatre company, The Wrestling School, and Brink Productions. ‘Birth’ was published in an excellent online literary journal called Masthead Literary Arts Ezine, edited by Alison Croggon who also blogs about theatre over at Theatre Notes.

If you are not familiar with Barker’s work and would like to read more, I recommend getting a copy of his selected plays Volume One and reading ‘The Castle’ and ‘Scenes From an Execution’, two of my favourite plays. Barker has also written two impressive critical works on theatre, Arguments for a Theatre and Death, the One and the Art of Theatre, both are an exposé of Barker’s thoughts on what he calls the ‘theatre of catastrophe‘ and ‘the art of theatre’:

“Theatre of Catastrophe is not a discipline. This alone marks it out from the general world of theatre practice which masquerades as a market-place for competing truths but in practice just exchanges one moral imperative for another. In this instance of theatre, the audience is relieved of the infantile burden of being brought to the author’s point of view – who cares about his point of view? – we ask him to be imaginative.

The following is a short bio of the author taken from the Masthead site:

“For the past two decades, Howard Barker has been a radical and controversial influence in British theatre. The author of more than 30 plays, he is considered widely to be one of the most innovative dramatists of modern times. His plays range from mythic landscapes of classical antiquity to the official and unofficial histories of the great massacres of the 20th century. “I believe,” he says, “in a society of increasingly limited options that a creative mind owes it to his fellow human beings to stretch himself and them, to give others the right to be amazed, the right even to be taken to the limits of tolerance and to strain and test morality at its source.”

I’d love to hear opinions on this scene so please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the piece. Also you can see Barker’s new production for 2006 at the Riverside Studios in London from the 21st Nov to 2nd of December. The new piece is called The Seduction Of Almighty God and it will be directed by upcoming French director Guillaume Dujardin who recently directed Howard’s Brutopia to great acclaim in France.