Howard Barker

INTERVIEWED BY NINA RAPI

Howard Barker is a playwright, director and theorist, with an international reputation. His highly imaginative, intellectually exciting plays create a unique aesthetic: theatrically inventive, emotionally intense, poetic yet also cerebral. His output of more than a hundred plays includes the modern classics Scenes from an Execution; Gertrude; Judith. He had a four-play season at the Odeon, Paris, in Spring, 2009, a year which marked the 21st anniversary of The Wrestling School, an ensemble dedicated to the exploration and production of his work. Still he remains somewhat an outsider in the UK.

There is an element of spirituality in your work in its intensity, precision and use of ritual, reminiscent of Genet. Do you see theatre as a potentially spiritual space? Entirely. I see no other pretext for its existence. Such is the plethora of communication, both in entertainment and so-called information, it is wilful suicide for theatre to permit itself to be annexed to functional ends. I have a compulsion to stage theatre, just as actors suffer the same compulsion to utter and move. These rhythms in a xed space immediately call up certain ritual processes. If, furthermore, your concerns are with death and how we arrive at it, you have to say yes, we make spiritual life our concern. That a public hardly exists for such theatre detracts not at all from the desire to create it. There is something of the secret in all spiritual processes, I would suggest. And my works a rumour, essentially. What is your creative impulse when you write a play? I would describe it as an impatience. When I am not engaged on a creative act I experience time as loss. To write is the pre-condition of any other form of activity, personal or public. It is therefore a process of keeping equilibrium, a sort of health. What I am writing I rarely know. I have said frequently that ignorance is a precious gift for artists, a profoundly rewarding point of departure. So how do you construct a play? Your structures are to die for! Yes, I have an innate sense of stage dynamics. I cant deny it. Power and sexuality seem to be your core, recurrent themes. They have also been classic themes in theatre from Greek Tragedy to Sartre and Genet to Caryl

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Churchill, Phillip Ridley, Anthony Neilson and Sarah Kane. What is your particular fascination with the subjects? I have written long and agonizingly about sexual love. And sexual seduction is manifestly an exercise of power, exquisitely irresponsible, and socially disruptive. But its necessary to admit the symbolic nature of sexuality, both in its essence and in its changing social manifestations. When one writes of sexuality one writes of the body but not only the body. What does the body represent as longed for, possessed, entered, maimed? The theft of the body, the annexation of the body, has interested me since my earliest plays. Lenin in the mausoleum. The unknown warrior. The fetishism of clothing. Its metaphorical reach is huge. And what about state power? In Scenes from An Execution, for example, the focus seems to be state power. State power is gured in a number of my plays about 1980/85, in The Europeans also. At a certain point, the sexual body and state power coincide appallingly, as in Judith. But in The Europeans Katrins half-butchered body also becomes a ground for struggle between state and private will. In Found in the Ground, your latest play, the main character is a gure of authority but at the same time he is also the most vulnerable - power here shown as non-monolithic, which is appealing. Toonelhuis is a nihilist, having been a moralist. His literal hunger to digest the remains of war criminals is perhaps the sort of destiny that unites apparent oppositions. In burning his library he mimics Hitlers abnegation of culture in the ruins of Berlin.

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The representation of sex on stage is very tricky. But I nd the representation of sex in Found in the Ground and your other plays effective: its both stylized and convincing. Do you stylize deliberately in order to create distance? My way as a director is to emphasize the separation between stage and the socalled realistic media, like lm and television. Theatre is body-in-space, and it calls up from the psyche of its public imaginative resources the so-called realists dont demand. It doesnt require mimetic fastidiousness. And anyway, who really believes the dead character is dead, or the sexual character is engaged in a sexual act? Its infantile to pretend like this. My obligation as director is to create metaphorical truth. For me theatre is about suggesting things, not about telling everything. You rarely speak of your working class background and people assume you are middle class. How much, if at all, has your class inuenced your take on reality and your aesthetics? My mother sent me for lessons in elocution. She loved me and thought I might emerge from my background with the help of a nice accent. How mistaken she was. How was she to guess the convolutions of modern snobbery? For some years I was conscious of the class struggle and described it. What I did not do however much I might have believed I did was to write the political play. The left had no time for me. The seat of Marxist Theatre, the Royal Court, rejected Claw, Victory and much else. Already tragedy was coming through these narratives, and that doesnt serve the lefts agenda. In terms of my method in dialogue, my background has been deeply signicant. The rhythm and pulse of my mothers and grandfa-

thers speech can be heard in my own texts. It was an education in living poetry, vivid and violent. And the vocabulary especially when anger informed it was replete with words from the C17th. When my mother was abusive, it was musical. The mix of this ancient argot with the cultivated phrasing I acquired through literature creates a distinctive voice. No other writer sounds like me. How do your characters differ from those of the dominant genres? The characters speak not only in a fashioned way characteristic of me, but also fully in a way that is impossible in naturalism. They have excess articulation, no matter what their class or education. I aim deliberately at plethora, knowing full well the public cant keep up. The speeches are broken, themes dropped and recovered again, strange, swift perceptions suddenly described, then buried under a coarse banality. Thats their pattern of speaking. In terms of their motivation, Im unconstrained by Stanislavskian or Brechtian ideas of truth. Since I have nothing to tell, I dont need to adhere to laws of theatre that are primarily to do with telling. And is the chaos in the minds of my characters less authentic? Hardly, I think. Youve written against clarity in theatre. But I personally nd your plays attractive because of their clarity of conception and execution. Do you feel there is a contradiction in this? The conception is actually not at all clear. I never set out with an idea or any intention. The attraction and indeed the spiritual element of the artistic experience is its ignorance, its blindness. The execution is different. Here I have an intention. I want to work with actors whose clarity of articulation is simply abnormal. I want to create images of beauty and this entails rigour and discipline. I direct actors. I rarely listen to them, and they understand this. They bring their gifts to the service of the vision I try to impart. Everything contributes, set, costume, sound, light is under this degree of control. The theatre suffers from a numbing aesthetic of solidarity, elucidation, clarity, and so on, a sort of debased democracy that insists on shared values and enlightenment. It is as if the culture was in dread of dissonance. Personally, dissonance is where I feel at home. Now, what is the consequence of this? It makes the public anxious. Some of it wants to get out as fast as possible. I dont stop them. But some sense the pleasures of anxiety in the dramatic space. Possibly they sense discipline in the cultural eld is unhealthy. Perhaps they feel manipulated when they enter the Royal Court Theatre, or the National. If they dont, they should do. And perhaps this connection with dissonance is what marks you as different. Youve written too that the differences between us might be sources of hope, discovery and creativity not just what we have in common. Is this notion of difference at the heart of your theatre project? In my plays you dont see the world as you know it but you see a world which has a point of contact with the world you do know. This culture is obsessed with the real world in a way that has never been before. All young writers are encouraged to write about themselves, about what they know or experienced. A lot of this goes back to a movement coming from what the Royal Court thought it was doing in the fties. It thought it was liberating the theatre into the world of reality and therefore it would bring the pain and problems of contemporary life into

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the stage. If that was a revolution at the time, it has now become concretized and sterile. For me this is the dead end for theatre, its a cul-de-sac. You have this extraordinary medium which is six thousand years old in which you have an actor and a body and a voice in this particular space. Its a situation that calls out for invention and imagination. The advice to the theatre to bring the real world into the stage is now reactionary in my opinion. Are we then making the social issue the substance of a democratic discourse? Well, this is clearly circular. And I think the hostility I have experienced in the past thirty years in this country from dramaturgs, critics and theatre managements is because Im not and cannot be associated with that process. What keeps you going in the face of such hostility to your work? I have to say Im not greatly injured by it. I have a feeling you thrive on it. It would be a sort of corruption to enjoy a marginal position in theatre for its own sake. I would not resist the staging of my plays (which are frequently large in scale) by large companies with resources. The question is, are these national institutions even capable of presenting them, given the political and social prejudices that dominate their aesthetic attitudes we cannot call it theory? Probably this will never be tested. But I have to say, the ensemble is the only signicant practice in theatre, and there are virtually none. The Wrestling School is exceptional, and of course, looks exceptional.

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But you used to be produced by the Royal Court, the Almeida and the RSC. What happened? At a rather early stage in my career I was nauseated by social realism. Nietzsche suggests we sense the death of an idea by its corrupt odour before we identify it intellectually. This was my experience. But what is peculiar is that the corpse lives on, and expands as I suppose a bloated corpse expands. I also wanted theatre to be a place for a poet. But the Royal Court and the rest squirm at poetic discourse, as they squirm at tragedy, which must also be poetic. They want to laugh at everything, because they are in the grip of a neurosis, as society is here. Whilst laughing, they think they can get the audience to swallow a few political ideas without noticing. Its a sordid practice, and infantilizes the public. Does the public resent being infantilized? Thats the question. A part of it surely does. What would you say the duty of the artist is, if such a thing exists? It may sound from what I say as if I believed in moral responsibility in artists, but I dont, and it is anyway a false dichotomy. The artist has no duty except to himself, by which I mean to say, to his instinct (not his conscience). If he obeys this injunction to speak his darkness, he will inevitably serve a public, for theatre speaks what is not spoken elsewhere, it is its supreme beauty.