A Hard Heart / The Early Hours of a Reviled Man

by Howard Barker

Howard Barker's A Hard Heart is about knowledge, self-knowledge, and the gulf between. Its protagonist, a strategist and innovator, is a culture's last defence against barbarity. During a long siege she provides the intellectual resources that delay a city's fall. But she is herself besieged by a man of infinite patience, her equal in cunning. His persistence, and her relations with the Queen, her patron, and with her only son, provide the distractions which fatally impede her ambitions to become no less than a god.

The Early Hours of a Reviled Man takes place over a single night, at its beginning the routine stroll of an anti-semitic doctor and novelist, at the end, a nightmare examination of his life and the ambiguities of his persecutors. Its protagonist is defiant, pathetic, savage, by turns, an excoriating figure tapping his way down city thoroughfares awash with horror and nostalgia. This is Louis-Ferdinand Céline at bay, reanimated as Sleen, whose simultaneous shamelessness and abjection make him the target of hatred and despairing love.

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Richard Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two plays that we can see from the stage directions were primarily intended as radio drama, though A Hard Heart got a stage production thirty years ago at the Almeida, with Anna Massey magnificently reprising her role as the misanthropic strategic genius, Riddler. Both show how underappreciated the potential of radio drama is.

Anna Massey was, of course, the daughter of Raymond Massey, who had played Gail Wynand so mesmerically in the film of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I have often wondered if this was an accident: did Barker intend Riddler as a comment on Rand's attitudes and world view? A Hard Heart has certainly coloured my appreciation of The Fountainhead and I'd recommend any fan of either text to check out the other.

The blurb of this edition announces The Early Hours of a Reviled Man to be based on the unrepentant Nazi Louis-Fernando Celine, of whose work I know nothing but from this he seems a way nastier piece of work than Ayn Rand! Certainly these plays vary widely in their attitude to their protagonists: the printed text and the radio production ultimately offer Riddler the hope of escape and of love and I recall the stage version coming even closer to giving her a happy ending. Sleen - played on the radio by Ian McDiarmid with a malignant creepiness that makes Emperor Palpatane look like an Ewok - is a menace who has to be destroyed: any attempt to engage with him in debate or criticism simply allows him to lead you into sophistry and obfuscation - so that he can survive to wreck more lives. Only his final assassin, not saying anything at all, deprives him of the chance of arguing his way out.

So: cynically misanthropic egomaniacs CAN be argued with and, perhaps, ultimately redeemed but, with a Nazi, you've just got to stick a bullet in the bastard.

Barker, as ever, respects his audience enough not to try forcing them into any particular response to these theses. In this respect, and others, I wish there were more like him.

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

These plays—like all of Barker's plays—are very Barker. The dialogue is arch; the characters are adamantine or sniveling as the case may be; the setting is medieval.

I enjoyed A Hard Heart. It's an intriguing exploration of genius and desire. The Early Hours of a Reviled Man was less interesting to me. It's a kind of Danton's Death meets A Christmas Carol starring Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and, well, I just didn't want to spend an entire play with Céline, even if the play knows he is someone to be reviled.