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Howard Barker, the Wrestling School, and the Cult of the Author
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
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Howard Barker was the last playwright to be interviewed in the original Theatre Quarterly – in TQ40 (1981) – and a subsequent interview was included in NTQ8 (1986). Yet he has also been accused of encouraging a credo of ‘engagement but confusion’ which serves the cult of Thatcherism which it claims to oppose: and certainly he is unique among his generation of British dramatists in having achieved both a large cult following, and a considerable body of opposition to his theoretical position. Robert Shaughnessy, who teaches in the Roehampton Institute, here analyzes not so much Barker's work as the Barker phenomenon – the process by which a self-effacing writer has been packaged into a personality, to the extent that, with the creation of The Wrestling School, he even has a theatre company devoted exclusively to the production of his work. Shaughnessy concludes that – as Barker perhaps fore-shadows in The Last Supper – it may now be necessary for the cult-figure to ‘die’ if the writer is to survive and flourish.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989
References
Notes and References
1. Barker, Howard, quoted by Steve Grant in ‘Barker's Bite’, Time Out, 17 02 1988Google Scholar.
2. Barker, Ibid.
3. Barker, Howard, ‘Don't Exaggerate: a Political Statement in the Form of Hysteria’, in Don't Exaggerate (Desire and Abuse) (London: Calder, 1985), p. 1–23Google Scholar; p. 1.
4. Ian McDiarmid, ‘Howard Barker: a Personal View’, in Gambit, No. 41 (Howard Barker Special Issue), p. 93–8; p. 94.
5. McDiarmid, Ibid., p. 94–6.
6. McDiarmid, Ibid., p. 95.
7. Barker, Howard, The Castle (with Scenes from an Execution) (London: Calder, 1985), p. 3Google Scholar.
8. McDiarmid, op. cit., p. 95.
9. Barker, Howard, ‘49 Asides for a Tragic Theatre’, The Guardian, 10 02 1986Google Scholar.
10. Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Bouchard, D. F. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 113–38Google Scholar; p. 128.
11. Barker, Howard, The Last Supper (London: Calder, 1988)Google Scholar, italics added.
12. Barker, Howard, That Good Between Us (with Credentials of a Sympathiser), (London: Calder, 1980)Google Scholar.
13. See, for example, Itzin, Catherine, Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain since 1968 (Methuen, 1980), p. 249–58Google Scholar; Bull, John, New British Political Dramatists (Macmillan, 1984)Google Scholar; Rabey, David Ian, British and Irish Political Drama in the Twentieth Century (Macmillan, 1986), p. 153–62Google Scholar.
14. Dawson, Anthony, ‘Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape’, Studies in English Literature, XXVII (1987), p. 303–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15. Since writing this I have learnt that Macmillan, are to publish a full-length study of Barker's work, Barker: Politics and Desire, in 1988Google Scholar.
16. Eric Mottram, ‘The Vital Language of Impotence’, Gambit, No. 41, p. 47–57; p. 47.
17. Tony Dunn, ‘Howard Barker: Socialist Playwright for Our Times’, Gambit, No. 41, p. 59–91; p. 90.
18. Ruth Shade, ‘All Passion Is a Risk: Sex and Sexual Politics’, Gambit, No. 41, p. 101–9; p. 109.
19. McDiarmid, op. cit., p. 93–4.
20. See ‘Energy – and the Small Discovery of Dignity: Howard Barker interviewed by Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler’, Theatre Quarterly, X (1981), p. 3–14; ‘Oppression, Resistance and the Writer's Testament: Howard Barker interviewed by Finlay Donesky’, New Theatre Quarterly, II (1986), p. 336–44.
21. ‘49 Asides for a Tragic Theatre’, The Guardian, 6 February 1986.
22. ‘Honour Thy Audience’, City Limits, 25 February 1988.
23. ‘The Redemptive Power of Desire’, The Times, 6 February 1986.
24. Barker, Ibid.
25. Women Beware Women (London: Calder/Royal Court, 1986).
26. ‘Honour Thy Audience’, op. cit.
27. Barker, Howard, ‘The Possibilities’, Plays and Players, 03 1988Google Scholar.
28. The Observer, 13 March 1988.
29. The Last Supper (London: Calder, 1988), p. 51.