17 July 2006 Written by Andrew Eglinton Print This Post  Email This Post

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.

You can pick up a copy of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible at London Theatre Blog’s Amazon-powered bookshop under the ‘UK PLaywrights’ section. You’ll also a selection of other works by the same author.