Honouring the Audience: the Theatre of Howard Barker

Abstract

Howard Barker’s career as a stage dramatist began with the production of Cheek in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in September 1970.1 Claw was produced at the Open Space in January 1975 and later that year Stripwell opened in the Royal Court Theatre’s main auditorium, to be followed by Fair Slaughter in 1977. 2 Barker was not destined to become a Royal Court writer, however, although several more of his plays have been seen there. Looking back from the late 1980s, he recognised that what he had always wanted was ‘a licence to speculate’ and ‘the courage to dream’, ambitions which could not be comfortably accommodated to the ‘documentary’ medium favoured by a theatre that was ‘resolutely naturalistic’ in outlook.3 His own uncompromisingly avant garde stance has meant that some of his plays have remained unperformed for years, and although the Royal Shakespeare Company has mounted a number of productions, they have been confined to its studio spaces (The Warehouse and The Pit). Other plays have been taken up by provincial repertory companies or staged in small experimental theatres. Barker notes ruefully that the National Theatre ‘has been offered every play of mine in the last ten years and ignored every one’. 4 It was in response to this situation that in 1988 a group of actors set up The Wrestling School, a company dedicated to performing plays by Howard Barker. KeywordsNational TheatreIdealistic FatherHeroic JourneyRadio PlayShort PlayThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.