Barker: Plays One

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849433313
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
Includes the plays Victory, The Europeans, The Possibilities and Scenes From An Execution. Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. These plays are among his best-known works, and their energy, poetic language and imagination have fixed them firmly in the international repertoire. Exploring the tragic form defined by Barker as Theatre of Catastrophe, three of the plays speculate on human behaviour in moments of historical crisis. Victory is set in the English Civil War and follows the ethical voyage of a widow towards personal reconstruction. The Europeans takes one of the great eruptions of Islamic imperialism asthe background for a young woman's insistence on her right to her own identity. Scenes from an Execution shows the struggle of an independently-minded artist against the power of the Venetian state. The Possibilities, a disturbing series of short plays set in various times and cultures, reveals Barker's unconventional way with moral dilemmas.

Incarnations

Author: Clive Barker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Contains three of Clive Barkers's best-known plays, Colossus, The History of the Devil and Frankenstein in Love. Echoing Barker's major themes - the nature of good and evil, pain and beauty, death and transformation - these plays offer an insight into the imagination of the playwright.

Death, the One and the Art of Theatre

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415349864
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
The latest collection of Barker's philosophical musings on theatre, this volume includes speculations, deductions, prose poems & poetic apercus, which cast a unique light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, love & theatre.

Scenes from an Execution

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 184943557X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
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

Barker: Plays One

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350924550
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

The Bite of the Night

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher: Calder Publications Limited
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description

Barker: Plays Five

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849432686
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
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.

Theatre Games

Author: Clive Barker
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408125196
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
A practical guide to using theatre games for actor training which includes a DVD with original footage of the author putting the techniques into action.

Granville Barker Plays: 1

Author: Harley Granville-Barker
Publisher: Methuen Drama
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
Harley Granville Barker was the most brilliant British director of the first quarter of the twentieth century. His best known plays, including Waste (banned by the Lord Chamberlain), were written as contributions to his Company's repertoire of provocative modern drama for a national theatre. In The Voysey Inheritance, a young man deals with the discovery that the inheritence due to him has been mismanaged by his own parents; Waste tells the story of a young man's whose life has been thrown away; The Secret Life is a portrait of spendthrift, indolent Edwardian aristocracy; Rococo is a one-act farce set in a vicarage and Vote by Ballot shows the teething troubles of mass democracy. This is a companion to Harley Granville Plays Two, which contains The Marrying of Ann Leete; The Madras House; His Majesty and Farewell to the Theatre.

Howard Barker: Plays Eleven

Author: Howard Barker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350230332
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
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.