Howard Barker Plays Two

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 184943347X
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Howard Barker: Plays Two written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the plays The Castle, Gertrude - The Cry, Animals in Paradise and 13 Objects. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The plays in this volume examine collisions of culture, gender and creed at moments of turmoil, developing the tragic form Barker defines as Theatre of Catastrophe. The Castle is set at the end of Crusades and describes the clashes that occur when returning soldiers bring an Arab architect home with them as a prisoner. Barker's abiding interest in interrogating the great classics for their 'silences' is shown in Gertrude - The Cry, his re-writing of the Hamlet story. Scarcely examined in Shakespeare, the passion of Gertrude for Claudius is made the centre of this harrowing tragedy, casting new light on the personality of Hamlet himself. Animals in Paradise was commissioned by the Swedish and Danish governments to celebrate their connection by bridge, a symbolic finish to centuries of antagonism. Barker's unexpected treatment of the theme provoked unrest on its first showing. 13 Objects movingly reveals the investment we make in inanimate things, their power to unsettle us, and how their talismanic qualities license new ways of seeing the world.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 184943557X
Total Pages : 81 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Scenes from an Execution written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commissioned to paint a vast canvas celebrating the triumphant Battle of Lepanto, the free-spirited Galactia creates instead a breathtaking scene of war-torn carnage. In her fierce determination to stay true to herself, she alienates the authorities and faces incarceration. Her younger lover Carpeta is approached to take over and seizes the assignment for himself. Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution makes sixteenth-century Venice the setting for a fearless exploration of sexual politics and the timeless tension between personal ambition and moral responsibility, between the patron's demands and the artist's autonomy. Art is opinion, and opinion is the source of all authority. This edition includes a new essay by Howard Barker, entitled The Sunless Garden of the Unconsolled: Some Destinations Beyond Catastrophe

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1783193123
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Howard Barker: Plays Nine written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest collection of plays by Howard Barker, one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of our time. Internationally renowned, his plays challenge, unsettle and expose. The latest volume in Oberon's Howard Barker series comprises the plays Harrowing and Uplifting Interviews, In the Cloth Cathedral, In the Depths of Dead Love and More No Still.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1849432686
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barker: Plays Five written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the plays The Last Supper, Seven Lears, Hated Nightfall and Wounds to the Face Howard 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.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 178319586X
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barker: Plays Eight written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trojan legend and the character of Helen form the basis for The Bite of the Night. As with all Barker’s mythical and historical works, it is overlaid and undermined by a contemporary narrative, in this instance the search for the origin of the erotic undertaken by the redundant university teacher Dr Savage and his nihilistic student, Hogbin. Through all twelve Troys, Savage and Helen struggle with a passion both intellectual and physical, and the idea of beauty is refined to a terrifying degree. In Brutopia Barker’s controversial portrait of the humanist Thomas More is shaped around his strained relationship with his daughter Cecilia, here discovered to be the author of a counter-text to her parent’s infamous Utopia. Cecilia’s wit and cruelty mark her out as one of Barker’s least compromising and heroic young women. The Forty is a significant departure from Barker’s dramatic practice, his investment in language reduced to a few phrases which punctuate detailed scenes of conflict and solitude. Physical movement, and intense concentration on gesture show the author’s flair for visuality in a new and surprising way. The theme of sacrifice features increasingly in Barker’s theatre, and in Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward it is a mother’s refusal to apologize for an act of passion – notwithstanding the dire consequence for her own child – that is at the heart of the argument. Set in a home for terminally-ill patients, many of whom create a hilarious chorus around the protagonists, Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward shows Barker’s imagination in its most startling form.

Author : David I Rabey
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526111225
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Howard Barker's art of theatre written by David I Rabey and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial and provocative multi-media artist. Beyond his internationally performed and acclaimed theatrical productions, and his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, he is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist cognisant of the unique power of art to provoke moral speculation, and of the distinctive theatricality of the human being in times of crisis. This collection of essays provides international perspectives on the full range of Barker’s achievements, theatrical and otherwise, and argues for their unique importance and urgency at the forefront of several genres of provocative modern art. It includes an interview with the artist and an essay by Barker himself.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1849433798
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barker: Plays Four written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the plays I Saw Myself, The Dying of Today, Found in the Ground and The Road, the House, the Road Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand her compulsion to transgress the laws of her society comes into collision with the conventions of an art form. In the weaving of a tapestry Barker's13th century heroine privileges private life over public responsibility. If she is cruelly punished she is also granted self-awareness. A critical moment in social decay is also at the centre of The Dying of Today, in which a stranger who luxuriates in the telling of bad news observes the effects of his devastating narrative on a humble barber. The barber's recovery from pain, and the beauty of his sensibility, bring the two strangers into an emotional proximity. Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground, a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his wayward daughter's struggle to make meaning from the atrocities of the 20th century. The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in The Road, the House, the Road. Erasmus' obscure colleague Aventinus was found dead on a wintry road. How he arrived at his solitary death forms the subject of this speculation on scholarship, mischief and the murderer's vocation.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350230332
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Howard Barker: Plays Eleven written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest collection of plays from one of the most celebrated, influential and studied playwrights in the English-speaking world. Howard Barker's plays continue to challenge, unsettle and expose. Barker's theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year in a sordid room. Inevitably they are inspected by God, but in a shape none could have predicted and only he can delight in. In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker's nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful words which arrive in sealed envelopes to prepare her for a succession of ordeals. Deep Wives and Knowledge and a Girl are short pieces, firmly established in the European theatre repertoire. In the first, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog. In Knowledge and a Girl, Barker reinterprets the Snow White fable from the perspective of the Stepmother.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1849432848
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Barker: Plays Six written by Howard Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the plays Judith, (Uncle) Vanya, A House of Correction, Let Me and Lot and His God Barker's radical rewriting of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya brought him more controversy than most of his other works put together. Interrogating not so much Chekhov's text as the use to which society has put it, Barker turns Vanya's defeat into victory and converts a play of sadness into a tragedy of desire. A House of Correction is a meditation on cause and effect. Set on the eve of a war which may destroy a society, the seemingly arbitrary arrival of a messenger with a vital communication sets off an agonizing train of events in the lives of three desperate women. Few works of drama can have plumbed the depths of solitude and rage that characterize Let Me, a nightmare set on the frontiers of the Roman Empire during the barbarian invasions. Biblical narratives serve as the origin of two shorter works, of which Judith is a contemporary classic of cultural conflict, a reinterpretation of the status of the heroine in Israel's war of survival against the Assyrians. In Lot and His God, the imminent destruction of Sodom simultaneously licenses the moral decay of an angel and the erotic epiphany of an adored wife.

Author : Howard Barker
Publisher : Calder Publications Limited
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 78 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Possibilities written by Howard Barker and published by Calder Publications Limited. This book was released on 1988 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: