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"The Castle" / "Scenes from an Execution"
With Barker's "The Castle" and "Scenes From an Execution."
- GenresPlays
89 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1985
30 people want to read
About the author
Howard Barker
125 books31 followersHoward 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.
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October 10, 2023is there no writer who can act fucking normally about vaginas ever
September 1, 2017
(This is, for now, only a review of The Castle, and even so, only a rather truncated one. I'm afraid this play eluded me a little bit.)
It's a play you want to read as soon as you hear the plot summary: a crusading knight and his followers return to England with a captured Arab architect in tow, only to find that in their absence their wives have taken control of society, fucking every noncombatant they can find and installing witchcraft as the state religion. It then comes as a slight disappointment that the play isn't focused on plot in a major sense. Very few pains are taken to set up the period: characters generally speak and behave like 20th century English roughs, and though I sometimes wished characters would shake off their Sarah Kane and slip into some John Webster, the juxtaposition of setting and speech does create compelling characters in a few instances. There is for example, Stucley, the returning knight, whose macho entitlement is detailed so specifically and individually as to depict a bluff, chatty bully simultaneously of all eras and of none. My personal favorite might be the ironically named Holiday, a skittish general contractor adept at taking the wind out of more loquacious characters, as when he memorably scoffs off the witch Skinner's "monosyllabic wisdom."
As remarkable as this play's characters is its language, which channels the rich, graphic fecundity of Jacobean drama into the elliptical, scatterbrained style of experimental modern drama: your Beckett, your Orton, and of course the aforementioned Kane.
Stucley says in scene two: "I do believe, I do believe this, that human beings left without severity would roll back the ages and be hopping, croaking frogs, clustering thick on the female with the coming of the Spring, and sunk in the mud for winter...!"
And what is that if not Thomas Middleton speaking through Leonard Rossiter's Rigsby?
This play is sometimes too in love with language for its own good. One's eyes begin to glaze after having read too many of its anxious, feverish monologues. But, all said, it isn't an especially obscure play: as a battle-of-the-sexes dramedy, it is pure 1980s.
The original production with Ian McDiarmid as Stucley and Antony Sher as Krak was probably a blast.
It's a play you want to read as soon as you hear the plot summary: a crusading knight and his followers return to England with a captured Arab architect in tow, only to find that in their absence their wives have taken control of society, fucking every noncombatant they can find and installing witchcraft as the state religion. It then comes as a slight disappointment that the play isn't focused on plot in a major sense. Very few pains are taken to set up the period: characters generally speak and behave like 20th century English roughs, and though I sometimes wished characters would shake off their Sarah Kane and slip into some John Webster, the juxtaposition of setting and speech does create compelling characters in a few instances. There is for example, Stucley, the returning knight, whose macho entitlement is detailed so specifically and individually as to depict a bluff, chatty bully simultaneously of all eras and of none. My personal favorite might be the ironically named Holiday, a skittish general contractor adept at taking the wind out of more loquacious characters, as when he memorably scoffs off the witch Skinner's "monosyllabic wisdom."
As remarkable as this play's characters is its language, which channels the rich, graphic fecundity of Jacobean drama into the elliptical, scatterbrained style of experimental modern drama: your Beckett, your Orton, and of course the aforementioned Kane.
Stucley says in scene two: "I do believe, I do believe this, that human beings left without severity would roll back the ages and be hopping, croaking frogs, clustering thick on the female with the coming of the Spring, and sunk in the mud for winter...!"
And what is that if not Thomas Middleton speaking through Leonard Rossiter's Rigsby?
This play is sometimes too in love with language for its own good. One's eyes begin to glaze after having read too many of its anxious, feverish monologues. But, all said, it isn't an especially obscure play: as a battle-of-the-sexes dramedy, it is pure 1980s.
The original production with Ian McDiarmid as Stucley and Antony Sher as Krak was probably a blast.
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