Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations and References PART I: A STYLE AND ITS CONTEXTS Gifts of Loss: An Introduction to Barker's Writing and Theatre 'The Ecstasy of Vanishing Meaning': Arguments for a Theatre; Death, The One and The Art of Theatre PART II: PLAYS AND PRODUCTIONS Intimacy with the Unforgivable: The Last Supper, The Early Hours of a Reviled Man, Golgo, Judith, Rome, Ten Dilemmas Cultural Re-Fashionings and Shakespearean Negotiations: Brutopia, Seven Lears, (Uncle) Vanya, Minna Separation, Sacrifice and Sainthood: A Hard Heart, Terrible Mouth, Hated Nightfall, Ego in Arcadia, The Brilliance of the Servant, The Gaoler's Ache, Twelve Encounters with a Prodigy, Ursula Facing the Wound: Wounds to the Face, Und, He Stumbled, House of Correction Infinite Reversibility: All He Fears, The Swing at Night, Albertina, Knowledge and a Girl, The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo, Animals in Paradise, The Ecstatic Bible, Found in the Ground Wrestling with God: Defilo, All This Joseph, Five Names, N/A (Sad Kissing), Gertrude - The Cry, The Seduction of Almighty God, The Moving and the Still, Two Skulls, Acts (Chapter One) Servitude and Servility: An Eloquence, The Blood of a Wife, A Rich Woman's Poetry, Stalingrad, Thirteen Objects, The Dying of Today, Dead Hands, Christ's Dog The Boundary and Beyond: The Fence, Heroica, Adorations Chapter 1, Dead, Dead and Very Dead, The Road, The House, The Road, Let Me, A Wounded Knife, Lot and his God, The Forty (Few Words), I Saw Myself Inconclusion: Consolations in Extremity: Howard Barker: A Style and its Origins Appendix One: Testimonies by Barker Actors: Julia Tarnoky, Justin Avoth, Edward Petherbridge, Melanie Jessop, Gerrard McArthur Appendix Two: Howard Barker: A Chronology Selected Further Reading Index

DAVID IAN RABEY is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and a dramatist, director and performer. His numerous critical publications include Howard Barker: Politics and Desire, English Drama Since 1940 and (as co-editor) Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker. His dramatic writing includes two volumes, The Wye Plays and Lovefuries. He has directed and/or acted in eleven Barker productions to date, including performing in Barker's own production of The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo. He is an Associate of Barker's theatre company, The Wrestling School.

'The range of coverage is a principle strength; the study includes pieces that have been neither produced nor published, thus giving a perspective on the full range of Barker's dramatic writing (the chronology in the appendices is also particularly helpful)... Rabey's book, then, is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical work on one of Britain's most challenging contemporary playwrights.' - Rachel Clements, Royal Holloway, University of London

'Following on from his earlier book...Ecstasy and Death meticulously maps not only Barker's plays and productions of the last twenty years, but also his theoretical and self-conscious performative development as a practitioner...it evolves and offers the reader an insightful distillation of critical approaches via a play-based chronology...Through a careful weaving of chronology and critique, it offers a structured series of provocations that invite the reader to examine the last twenty years of Barker's plays and their production...It's pinpoint focus invites wider moments of reflection and challenges the reader not to fix Barker to one play, one aspect of the work or even one decade, but rather to engagae with Barker over more time and to see his work as an ongoing evolution of language, aesthetics and theory.' - Sarah Goldingay, Studies in Theatre and Performance

'Rabey's criticism in these books offers a meditation, a critical and lyrical vision, not merely of Barker's theatre but of theatre's place in a 21st-century culture' - George Hunka, Superfluities: A Journal