Howard Barker: 23 books

Howard Barker’s form of tragedy – his Theatre of Catastrophe – is a speculation on the way individuals dislocated by social or personal crises make meaning from their pain, sometimes willing their own extinction, sometimes altering the terms on which they might continue to exist. Their...

Two new plays by Howard Barker Slowly As barbarians approach the palace of a decaying culture, four princesses debate their fate. Decorum demands suicide. But, for some, the possibility of life is all too compelling. In a culture of conformity, it may not be up to the individual to decide... Hurts...

The latest collection of plays by Howard Barker, one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of our time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. Plays Ten comprises the plays Ahno, Distance, Critique of Pure Feeling, Irrespective, Immense Kiss, Exquisite.

Includes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the Face Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose.Both The Last Supper and Seven Lears exemplify Barker's way with great religious...

Includes the plays The Castle, Gertrude - The Cry, Animals in Paradise and 13 Objects. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The plays in this volume examine collisions of culture, gender and creed at...

Includes the plays Victory, The Europeans, The Possibilities and Scenes from an Execution .Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. These plays are among his best-known works, and their energy, poetic language...

Includes the plays I Saw Myself, The Dying of Today, Found in the Ground and The Road, the House, the Road Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand...

Howard Barker's alter-ego Eduardo Houth first materialised as the photographer of publicity images for Barker's theatre company The Wrestling School, one of many fictional identities assumed by the playwright to screen a range of his activities, including set and costume design. Writing of...

Commissioned to paint a vast canvas celebrating the triumphant Battle of Lepanto, the free-spirited Galactia creates instead a breathtaking scene of war-torn carnage. In her fierce determination to stay true to herself, she alienates the authorities and faces incarceration. Her younger lover Carpeta...

Howard Barker’s theatre is characterized by its tragic scale and its distinctive way of exposing the unconscious resistances that underlie apparent social unanimity, both in the sexual and political spheres. Barker’s play, BLOK/EKO, is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the...

The Trojan legend and the character of Helen form the basis for The Bite of the Night. As with all Barker’s mythical and historical works, it is overlaid and undermined by a contemporary narrative, in this instance the search for the origin of the erotic undertaken by the redundant university teacher...

Death, The One and the Art of Theatre is the latest collection of Barkers distinctive and revelatory philosophical musings on theatre. It is a stunning array of speculations, deductions, prose poems and poetic aperçus that casts a unique and unflinching light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism,...

For more than three decades Howard Barker has argued passionately against the deformation of English theatre by social realism. Insisting on the primacy of tragedy over all art forms in Western culture, his elaboration of a tragic form for our time – identified by him as The Theatre of Catastrophe...

Includes the plays Claw, Ursula, He Stumbled and The Love of a Good Man The plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw, a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its...