Barker: Plays Five

by Howard Barker

Includes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the FaceHoward 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 and literary stories, the first placing the willful suicide of a Christ-like prophet, Lvov, in the context of modern chaos, illuminating his moral ambiguities with comic or painful parables, the second taking its inspiration from the significant absence in Shakespeare's play, that of Lear's wife, the queen whose murder is here discerned as the origin as the great family tragedy.The execution of the Russian royal family remains shrouded in mystery - not least that of the identity of two bodies discovered in the mass grave years after the event. In Hated Nightfall Barker's speculative imagination leads him to identify these as the children's tutor, Dancer, and a recalcitrant servant, Jane. Dancer is perhaps Barker's archetypal hero, febrile, iconoclastic, yet in search of a self-sacrifice nothing appears to justify. In Wounds to the Face, our complex and sometimes violent relations with our own physiognomy form the psychological link between related scenes of wounding, notoriety, shame and vanity in a play of kaleidoscopic energy and imagery.

Genres: Plays

314 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Howard Barker is an English playwright. His plays have been produced at the Royal Court, the RSC and the National Theatre, throughout Europe and the USA and by his own company, The Wrestling School. He is best known as the exponent of the Theatre of Catastrophe. He is a theatre theorist, a poet and a painter. His work has been the subject of a number of book-length studies and academic conferences.

Reviews

[Harry McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hated Nightfall is particularly good in this.

[Dianne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like it. I liked many of the over arching themes and enjoyed the language. However there is too much violence on men, from men, all of which goes unpunished. Rape is not a plot point - please don' just gloss over it. There were no repercussions from this and the women never react to the violence on them. Highly unrealistic and male gaze.

A shame.

This could have been better. Why were my degrees so full of male authors? I need to write a stern email to my old university highlighting this massive and serious issue.