1. Ex-Melbourne and Red Stitch director Sam Strong has been appointed the new artistic director of Sydney's Griffin Theatre. Joanne Erskine has the goods at Cluster.

2. Critic Mark Mordue has won this year's Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year Prize. (Those of you with long memories will recall I was last year's winner; this year I was on the judging panel and can say he was the unanimous choice.) More on Mark's work from James Bradley at City of Tongues. Another blogger/freelance critic: it suggests that the common perception that blogs are the death of criticism might be getting a few critical hits.

3. George Hunka at Superfluities Redux posts details of Howard Barker in conversation on, well, all sorts of things. Go hence.

4. The Guardian flatters me outrageously by listing me as one of five must-read critics, alongside Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Peter Campbell and James Wood. Excuse me while I lie down and recover.

Liminal Theatre prints a long quotation from Howard Barker's collection of essays, Arguments for a Theatre, on the back of their program for Oedipus - A Poetic Requiem. It's from Barker's essay Theatre Without a Conscience, in which he condemns the "social hygiene" of a theatre which seeks to improve and enlighten and educate, a theatre which, as he says, "never sins". Barker, always the fiercest defender of imagination and beauty, demands a theatre that is a "black box", a theatre in which darkness reveals the inherent danger of play, and which seeks not the easy gratification of moral acquiescence, but the solitary terror of being.


What Barker proposes in part is the trangression of ritual, the dark transformation which unites the sacred and the profane. He interrogates the thrill that surges through our bodies as darkness falls in a theatre. "Why are we... half afraid? Is it because we are about to watch an actor? Yes, because actors are not entirely human, but more, it is the sense of attending on a sin, the possibility of witnessing a transgression..." Theatre, says Barker, is immoral; but he also quite clearly - and quite rightly - says that as a dramatist, he is a moralist. In fact, he is one of those artists whom George Bataille once called hypermoralists - artists like Jean Genet or Emily Bronte or De Sade or William Blake, whose attacks on the certainties of social morality are in the service of a more austere questioning, a rigorous and merciless calling to account of individual experience and thus of individual responsibility. The exact opposite, one might say, of moralising.

These reflections are certainly pertinent to the ambition of Mary Sitarenos' production of Oedipus. Sitarenos has taken Ted Hughes' free adaptation of the classic tragedy, Seneca's Oedipus, and transposed it into a choric lament by four women; the text has been edited but not substantially altered. Hughes' text was originally written for the National Theatre, premiering in 1968 in a production directed by Peter Brook. As Hughes said, his collaboration with Brook sought to "unearth the ritual possibilities" within the play. The result is one of the best things Hughes ever wrote, a play in which the words all but blister the lips in their speaking. Its visceral potency is still shocking: its invocation of an amoral, unjust universe blasted by plague and famine, of a life which makes death the lesser evil, remains terrifying.

Liminal Theatre creates Barker's black box, a work that plays like a nightmare across the retina of the subconscious. Sitarenos draws on Liminal's Asian influences - which have been internalised also in 20th century western theatre through Artaud and Brecht - to create a kind of theatre that is unique in Melbourne: a theatre that attends to its roots in ritual, and which here enacts the catastrophic edges of imaginative possibility. With Ivanka Sokol's dynamic video projections - fluid plays of abstract imagery that hauntingly hide and reveal and distort the human body - and Chris Wenn's driving sound design, which unites echoes of ancient Greek music with modern electronic sound - Sitarenos creates a kind of total theatre that engages all the senses. And it's performed in all its relentlessness without a trace of apology or irony (aside, of course, from the black irony of Oedipus's fate).

The play takes place in an intimate theatre that seats maybe 40 people at most, its walls defined by black cloth. A mask is projected onto black curtains as a pre-recorded prologue - a brief contemporary speech about the significance of the myth of Oedipus - crackles through the auditorium. Then two women, their white arms spectral against their black robes, draw open the curtains, revealing a stage naked but for a single leafless branch to one side. And we launch into the opening speeches, summoning us into a landscape of death, of dried springs and withered harvests and the reek of funeral pyres and rotting corpses.

The conception is at once simple and ingenious. Oedipus is represented by a simple mask suspended from the ceiling, and his speeches are recorded, his physical absence playing disconcertingly against the live enactments. Jocasta is also a mask, although her speeches are performed by one of the four performers (Ivanka Sokol, Jo Smith, Georgina Durham and Claire Nicholls). The action of the play is physically realised through stylised movement, white limbs and faces writhing out of darkness, that is given an unnerving textural variety (fleshly rottenness, flame and fire, the ambiguity of mist and smoke) by Sokol's video work.

The effect of all the different elements is to throw the emphasis onto Hughes' text, which at times - such as in the stunning scene when Manto describes an "evil" sacrifice to the blind Tiresias, or during the description of Oedipus's self-blinding - is almost as hard to bear as if we were really witnessing those terrible acts. In the face of so much achievement, it is a little churlish to wish that the actors' voices had been more compelling; but often the voices, while certainly adequate, left something to be desired. Even a little more actorly control and power would have made a great deal of difference.

No matter what the quibbles, the achievement and scope of this piece is astounding: here we gaze into the abyss that is tragedy, an abyss that is always and without exception an enactment of and a lament for our own inevitable deaths. Out on the edges of our culture, with the most minimal of resources, Liminal Theatre is making theatre of a rare ambition and seriousness. Attention must be paid.

Essay: The Irresponsible Mr Barker

Oedipus - A Poetic Requiem, from Seneca's Oedipus by Ted Hughes, directed by Mary Sitarenos. Set design by Mary Sitarenos. Videographer Ivanka Sokol, sound construction Chris Wenn, sound design by Chris Wenn and Mary Sitarenos, lighting deisgn by Damien Lentini. Chorus of women: Ivanka Sokol, Jo Smith, Goergina Durham and Claire Nicholls, with voices by Peter Finlay, Paul Robertson and Mary Sitarenos. Liminal Theatre @ J-Studios, 100 Barkly Street, North Fitzroy, until September 14. Tickets at Easytix.

To my distress and dudgeon, I did Matt's Which Book Are You? quiz and found out that I am J. Alfred Prufrock. I guess it could be worse, but I'm not sure how. Anyway, perhaps there is a truth there - I am short, I drink a lot of coffee, I'll never play Prince Hamlet and maybe I am measuring out my life in blogs. And it's only getting worse. In one of my lives I have actual fans, whose mail keeps piling up uncontrollably, and in a (probably futile) attempt to wrestle my selves into some kind of order, I've started a Books of Pellinor blog. Pretty, ain't it? Like, I needed something else to do...

Meanwhile, as promised, Ming has posted at length on Lee Lewis's Currency House paper on Cross Racial Casting. And over at Nicholas Pickard's place, the debate still rages. Lewis seems to have touched some very sensitive nerves. (Yes, I will - when I have a moment - buy the paper and read it for myself). Watch this space for details of an up-coming public forum with Lee Lewis in Melbourne-town.

Skipping over to George Hunka - the man is, according to the current issue of The Dramatist, one of 50 playwrights to watch in the US, but us blog denizens knew that already, eh? Anyway, check out his excellent meditation on Howard Barker's latest book, A Style and its Origins (written, it seems, by Barker's alter-ego, Eduardo Houth). More blowing of the budget, I fear.

And finally, just to prove that theatre types have their sweaty fingers pressed firmly on the popular pulse, see several bloggers on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Andrew Haydon at Postcards from the Gods liked its new grunge aesthetic and thought it the best yet (as did I); Richard Watts thought it was good, but not as good as the last one and Isaac over at Parabasis has got all the fanboys excited with a suggestion that someone write about the books as literature...

Newsflash: Howard Barker's theatre company, The Wrestling School, has had its funding cut, as the first high-profile casualty of the London Olympics' raiding of the British arts coffers.

Barker has his say in the Guardian here:

In killing The Wrestling School the Arts Council has silenced a voice, and yet further diminished the range of theatre practice when its very purpose was to extend this range. Political interference is now seen to be the standard practice of the funding system. We live with the washed-out remains of a Stalinist bureaucracy obsessed not with art but social welfare projects, points-systems and 'public benefit' scrutiny, which annihilates (or rather, in the context, "liquidates") thriving and ambitious companies and artists.

Sounds familiar, somehow...remember the stoush over La Mama last year? And yes, arts funding is, among many other things, an issue to do with freedom of speech. George Hunka editorialises at Superfluities, and I'm sure much more will be said.

Playwright and critic Walter A. Davis has a brilliant and thought-provoking essay just up at MCW News which takes apart the tired old left/right binaries which infect discussions of political theatre. It's a must-read for anyone interested in (or depressed about) the possibilities of theatrical art. And it's absolutely applicable to ideologies at work in Australian theatre.

Jumping off the My Name Is Rachel Corrie controversy, which is virally spreading through the US media, Davis inspects the actual play, which he predicts will be clutched to the bosoms of all those wishing to tattoo "progressive" on their ideological foreheads, and isolates the conservative gene which resides fatally inside all documentary theatre - its refusal, finally, of aesthetic and political imagination. Davis' argument reflects Howard Barker's stentorian criticisms of what he calls "the theatre of journalism":

On those rare occasions when a play succeeds in preserving the conditions of genuine art, it offers its community a challenge that goes far deeper than controversial comments on a given political topic.  For such works cleanse the doors of perception, thereby transforming our relationship to ourselves and the world.  We feel and experience everything in new ways, ways fraught with anxiety but also with the pulse of transgressive discovery.  Ideology no longer retains its habitual and automatic control over our minds. It is in this sense that Hamlet and Marat/Sade and Three Sisters are political in a way far more radical than The Permanent Way to Victoria Britain or Guantanamo or, to strike closer to home, the confused Messianic (and non Benjaminian) aesthetic of Angels in America or the self-congratulatory sexual posturing of The Vagina Monologues.

In transforming the very terms of our experience radical works of art exposes their audience to the pervasive ways in which we are prisoners of ideologies that severely limit our possibilities of thinking and feeling.  Plays that perform such a function need never directly address a political topic in order to be political in the deepest sense by making it impossible for us to experience the world the way we previously did.   The popular concept and practice of political theatre, in contrast, severely truncates this possibility.  It offers us no more than a quick ideological fix on some current issue.  As a result we are more the slave of ideology—be it liberal or conservative, religious or secular, or whatever—than we were before.  All such dramas do is incite the faithful so that we’ll fall into line the next time we’re polled on some issue or asked to contribute cash to some politician campaign.

Thanks to Superfluities for the heads up.

It's all happening in the theatre blogosphere. First of all, my estimable colleague Chris Boyd has kicked off his own theatre review blog, The Morning After: Performing Arts in Australia, with a couple of reviews of Cheek by Jowl and Robert Lepage at the Sydney Festival, so do check it out.

And the question of the theatre audience is the topic du jour in the US, where the blogsters are all arguing hammer and tongs. It was indirectly sparked by my posting the Foreman quote, which led to George Hunka over at Superfluities posting a quote from my essay on Howard Barker. In response to Scott Walters at Theatre Ideas agreeing with Barker, but with a caveat, George posted this passionate response, where he says in part:

Some audience members see ... difficult work as an attack, as perhaps they should, since it tells them that their conception of the world isn't theirs but a reflection of something manufactured for them to keep them asleep. Nobody, especially those who are confident in their self-indulgent belief that they know how the world works, wants to hear that. Others, seeing the same show, won't see it as an attack at all, but will be open-minded enough to see it as an invitation to a new vision: their own. Neither Foreman nor Barker wants the audience to think like them, to feel like them, but wants them to think and feel for themselves, individually, to find liberation in confronting their own darkest depths. The dramatist is a metaphor in his or her own work, a metaphor for individual perception, as the lyric voice serves in his or her own poetry. It is an invitation to profound, wrenching, transformative, painful change. As somebody once said about omelets and eggs, you can't make an epiphany without shattering a world.

Scott Walters responds here with a long and interesting post, and Matt Freeman on his Theatre and Politics blog here. And some lively discussion continues in the comments... all in all, it makes for a fascinating conversation.

Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane, directed by Julie Waddington, design Julie Waddington and Luke Hails, sound by Nicholas Albanis. With Ben Noble, Georgina Capper, Fabienne Parr, Peter Roberts, Nick Austin, Pablo Calero, Alison Boyce, Jacinta Perry and Keira Lyons. Abstract Chaos with Instorage at the Store Room, until November 21.

Sarah Kane is the most exciting British playwright to emerge in the past decade. Her work was long overshadowed by the tabloid frenzy sparked by the 1995 production of her first play, Blasted, notoriously greeted as the product of a "sick" mind by a succession of rabidly foaming reviewers. The Daily Mail's Jack Tinker memorably labelled it a "disgusting feast of filth".

In common with many English-language writers treated without honour in their own countries (Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Howard Barker), European theatre was quick to recognise Kane's significance and welcomed Blasted as one of the most important plays of the 1990s. Critical opinion in Britain began to turn in 1998 with the premiere of Crave, but her suicide the following year made her the poete maudite of her generation. After her suicide, Kane's plays - like Sylvia Plath's poetry, and to their equal detriment - were mostly read as autobiographical expressions which foreshadowed her untimely death. As much as the claim that she wrote to shock for shock's sake, this romanticised notion obscured her uncompromising theatrical innovation.

In Australia, despite her steadily growing international reputation, Kane's work is still the province of the "fringe". She has been staged by theatres like Brisbane's La Boite and Sydney's New Theatre or the Stables, or by small independent theatre companies in Melbourne. I mean no disrespect to independent companies when I say that it's a shameful reflection on Australian theatre that one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the English language is unable to get a gig on a major stage.

Kane was one of a post-Thatcher generation of playwrights which emerged in the 1990s and challenged the pedagogic "theatre of journalism" exemplified most notably by David Hare. Many of them looked to playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, or to Howard Barker's "theatre of catastrophe", as animating inspirations. As Kane's work evolved, her plays successively attacked the notion of theatrical naturalism in a distinctively visceral way. The revulsion and shock her plays invoke is never gratuitous, but is intended to provoke a re-evaluation of reality.

Although these playwrights were called the Nihilists or the New Brutalists, Kane's vision is far from nihilistic. It exposes a moral universe in which, as Hamlet says, "there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so", and searches uncompromisingly for an ethics which can survive the violence of our contemporary world. But even 4:48 Psychosis, her final, excoriatingly beautiful masterpiece, finishes with a fragmentary but stubborn hope that should not be dimmed by her subsequent suicide.

Abstract Chaos' production of Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, is an uncertain rendering of Kane's work, but worth seeing nevertheless. The night begins promisingly, but by the end has fallen off the unforgiving tightrope that Kane sets up with such deceptively simple assurance. It exemplifies the kind of difficulties - lack of resources, lack of time - faced by independent theatre productions. I should add that some of its problems may resolve as the season progresses.

Phaedra's Love is Kane's take on Seneca's and Euripides' tragedies Hippolytus, which tell the legend of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus. She is cursed by Aphrodite and falls desperately in love with her stepson, the beautiful and chaste youth Hippolytus, with catastrophic results. It is most famously adapted by Racine in his play Phaedre, which is written in what are allegedly (I have to take George Steiner's word for it) sublimely beautiful alexandrines.

Kane's take couldn't be more iconoclastic, although it still has traces of the naturalism which she afterwards abandoned altogether. Phaedra's Love is the most darkly funny of her plays and is also the first which explores the nature of love, a theme that became the major obsession of the later work. Here she perverts Phaedra's tragedy to create what is at once a chilling vision of the nature of obsessive love, and a strange liberation from despair.

In Phaedra's Love, Hippolytus (Ben Noble) is very far from being the chaste and beautiful youth of the original story. He is physically and emotionally repugnant, seen in the opening scene watching tv while wanking into a sock. (He checks that he hasn't blown his nose in it first). Phaedra's (Georgina Capper) fatal passion for him is therefore inscrutable and terrifying; when she declares her love, in a scene of skin-crawling humiliation, she performs oral sex on him while he watches television and snacks indifferently from a bag of lollies.

Yet in his monstrous boredom, his disgust with the falsity of everything that surrounds him, Hippolytus is also a curiously attractive character. Behind his joylessness and refusal of any human contact lies a desire for absolute honesty, a ruthless integrity which will have no truck with a world that disgusts him. The only time he shows anything like wonder is after he hears of Phaedra's suicide: "She really did love me... Bless her." And it becomes clear that Phaedra's accusation of rape against him is not the act of revenge that it appears to be, but a gift: the orgy of violence which follows is, at last, a real moment, in which there is no trace of human deceit. Hence his final words: "If there could have been more moments like this."

Phaedra's suicide is the logical result of the fire which has so consumed her, her abnegation the utter loss of self which is, as Kane perceived, tragically attracted to its opposite, the self that will compromise nothing. The gravity exerted by these extremes detroys everything around them - Phaedra's daughter Strophe (Fabianne Parr) is raped and murdered by Theseus (Peter Roberts) in the final carnage. But Kane's humour here is wicked: the murders of the Royal family are represented as a barbecue, with Hippolytus' genitals becoming a gruesome sausage.

Kane's grand guignol violence contains a serious critique, of classical theatre as much as of the nature of human love and the dilemma of the self. It's in eight tautly written scenes, which move rapidly to its horrifying and obscenely funny conclusion. Unfortunately, Julie Waddington's direction seldom matches the icy clarity of the text, so nothing is ever quite in focus.

Stylised acting at the pitch this play demands requires a depth of polish that the standard four weeks' rehearsal simply cannot achieve with any certainty. Georgina Capper's performance as Phaedra is the most successful in negotiating the challenges of the play's stylistic formality, and has some genuinely thrilling moments. Ben Noble's Hippolytus achieves his character's grossness, but falters at the extremity of his despair and so cannot reveal his perverse nobility. I had the feeling that often the other performances were hesitant or even, at times, without conviction. This means that the final scene has all the faults of stage violence when it doesn't work: despite the liberal application of tomato sauce it merely looks fake, and the audience laughs for the wrong reasons.

I thought the set design a major problem in this production. Admittedly, Kane wrote with a fine disregard for the difficulties of designers: at one point Phaedra's body is meant to be set on fire, which defeated the ingenuity of this production team. At times, however, the set literally gets in the way of seeing the action, and the pace is hindered by cumbersome moveable blocks which are rearranged between scenes. The set changes impede the flow of the tragedy, stilting its emotional movement so it achieves neither apotheoses of horror nor comedy. Despite these reservations, it's a rare chance to see - if through a glass darkly - a fascinating work by a major contemporary dramatist.

Links
The Store Room
Sarah Kane

Wounds to the Face, By Howard Barker, directed by Jess Kingsford, with Stephanie Miller, Joshua Hewitt, Christopher Brown, Matt Boesenberg, Robert Meldrum, Stephen Phillips, Nina Landis, Michelle Hall, Nicki Paull, Adrian Mulraney. Black Box Theatre at Theatreworks, St Kilda.

To say that Howard Barker's plays are difficult to realise is probably an understatement. They are written to make demands - on audiences, directors, designers, and perhaps especially on actors. It is no use, for example, approaching Barker's drama with conventional ideas about psychology or biography; his characters are ciphers, fictional fantasies who blaze briefly on the stage and then vanish, people in improbable or impossible situations with only their present theatrical life to illuminate and animate their existences.

Wounds to the Face is a kind of theatrical essay on identity. Its drama is driven not by narrative but by questions: What is a face? What does it mean to "lose face"? What are we without a face? It examines these questions through a series of woundings by plastic surgery, political propaganda, desire and deception, in a fascinating blend of philosophical argument and sheer theatricality.

It opens with a woman in front of a mirror, painting and repainting herself with cosmetics, attempting to remake her face with despairing self-hatred. It's telling that the first scene is entitled "First, to love yourself", invoking a naricissism which theatricalises itself in the course of the play as a deadly struggle for power over oneself and over others. Its narrative moves through a series of surreal vignettes - a soldier whose face is destroyed by a grenade; an Emperor viewing a portrait of himself; a French aristocrat imprisoned in the Bastille who is not permitted to remove a mask; a war in classical Greece in which the Greeks are maimed by a machine designed to destroy their facial beauty; a slapstick duel to the death between two doubles.

It becomes clear that a face is a mask which hides as much as it reveals, the harbinger of an identity which can be a tyranny as much as a freedom and a desire. Like the poem in which Randall Jarrell looks at his aging face in a mirror and wonders what has happened to him, it seems to suggest: If just living can do this to you /Then living is terrible. Merely to have a face is to enter the cruel and exhilarating game of representation and identity.

Barker makes little attempt to imitate reality, although the realities he summons can have uncomfortable connections with those we recognise as our own. The only truths in his plays are what he calls "emotional truths". And these are legion: Barker's imagination moves to extremes and contradictions, often placing his historyless characters in moments of extreme sexual desire, or physical suffering, or emotional extremes of hatred and love. The more bizarre their circumstances, the more responsibility devolves onto the actor to make that circumstance real.

The risk in mounting Barker's work is that the actors might not able to deal with the complex challenges of the language. If an actor cannot find the necessary emotional truths - manifold truths, it must be said, which almost always include a corrosive irony - Barker's work collapses into nonsense or empty rhetoric, there being no other means of support for its reality. When an actor performs the text with suppleness as well as profundity, as most signally Adrian Mulraney does in his roles as the Emperor and the Dictator, the vignette lights up and its argument makes sense. I particularly liked also Stephanie Millar, who is on stage for the entire two hours assaulting her face with cosmetics, and Stephen Phillips, who plays the massively wounded soldier. But unfortunately, in this production the acting is all too often naive or mono-dimensional. The temptation is to substitute shouting and large gestures for passion, or to fall, as Robert Meldrum does, into a kind of all-purpose cod-poetic, deadening Barker's visceral language with rather too much respectful attention to its "poetry". Barker's poetry is of the robust, Shakespearean sort, and responds as badly as Shakespeare's does to self-conscious declaiming.

The design is interesting, and by splitting the stage into different playing areas makes a good fist of the cavernously difficult Theatreworks space. Even so, I wondered why some of it existed. This may sound totally anal, but I spent a fair bit of the play watching a ladder, wheelbarrow and bucket towards the back of the stage, waiting for them to be used; and when they weren't (or did I miss something?) I felt slightly cheated - and then puzzled as to why they were there in the first place, or what the piles of books on the floor meant - well, this is how I amuse myself. But the cozzies are very impressive.

Jess Kingsford's direction straddles Barker's extremes uncomfortably, falling down in the end perhaps because of its own earnestness as much as the mixed acting. The play itself, especially compared to most of Barker's oeuvre, is relatively short - in print, less than 30 pages - and I think one of the problems is simply that this production runs too long. It goes for almost two hours, and I wondered how much the length was simply to do with the mechanics of getting people on and off the huge stage of Theatreworks.

But the length is also surely in the playing: for the most part, this production tends to solemnity rather than seriousness. It is also curiously sexless, with never a real erotic moment despite the odd flash of cleavage or buttock; which is a pity, since there's lots of real and confronting sex in the text. It's a brave attempt, with some good moments, but in the end its achievement is decidedly mixed.

Theatreworks
The Irresponsible Mr Barker

"Art has no duty" - Howard Barker

English playwright Howard Barker must be in the zeitgeist. Just last week, Barker's play Wounds to the Face opened at Theatreworks in Melbourne (review next week) and his dystopian fantasy Victory closed after a sell-out season at the Sydney Theatre Company. I found myself again browsing his book of essays, Arguments for a Theatre, and the following day noticed an extraordinary attack on Victory in the current issue of Quadrant.

Victory aroused the ire of one Geoffrey Partington. I am unable to find out much about Mr Partington; I assume he is the same Geoffrey Partington who has written other articles for Quadrant and who describes himself as "a South Australian educationalist". He writes as if he is seated in a manorial chair in tweeds, puffing on a pipe and lamenting the rise of the split infinitive, and his spluttering is the sort of thing which would warm the cockles of any old radical's heart.

On the evidence of his essay, Partington's only knowledge of Barker is what he has read in the mainstream media - his one sourced quote is from an interview in The Australian - and it is impossible to determine if he has actually seen the play he is attacking. This seems a rather poor basis for an "educationalist" to launch an attack on a writer even The Times refers to as "one of the UK's greatest living playwrights". He is entitled to his apoplexy, which mainly agitates around Barker's cavalier treatment of historical fact (more of this later). What most concerned me about his article was, in fact, this statement: "I do not wish to prevent others from spending time and money on travesties such as Victory, but I resent it bitterly if public money subsidises them in any way." ¹

Since a production of the scale of the STC's would not be possible without public money, his is a call for such theatre to be effectively banned from our main stages. There have been too many calls to censor art lately, from too many quarters; and Partington's essay is in fact an attack on the basis of art's freedom, imagination itself. So perhaps it is worth examining in some detail.

Barker's plays have had occasional productions in Australian theatres over the past couple of decades, but the relative popularity of his work since the late '90s is largely due to the former director of Adelaide's Red Shed Company, Tim Maddock. He introduced Howard Barker to a new and young audience when he directed The Europeans and Uncle Vanya for Brink Productions in Sydney and Adelaide. This culiminated in an extraordinarily ambitious production of Barker's six hour epic The Ecstatic Bible, a co-production between Brink and Barker's own company, The Wrestling School, which premiered at the 2000 Adelaide Festival. Since then, the most high profile production has been the STC season of Victory, which featured a return to the stage by Judy Davis, and which attracted Partington's displeasure. I was green that I could not see it myself, but a lot of Sydneysiders did.

Partington is as peeved by Victory's full-house success as he is by its existence, and sneeringly mentions "the paucity of performances his plays receive in Britain" to suggest that those Sydney theatre crowds were sadly misled in their enthusiasm for the play. He drags out the usual abusive labels. Barker is apparently "postmodernist", a term which isn't defined, though it could be argued that his work is actually closer to the individualistic modernisms of playwrights like Jarry and Artaud; and it is heavily implied also that his work is "PC", surely one of the more bizarre criticisms of Barker's iconoclastic ouevre. Even stranger when you consider than Partington is also exercised by Barker's celebrated usage of obscene language (especially that "c" word).

But Partington's major objection to Victory is that Barker gets his history wrong. After pointing out Barker's historical errors - that certain incidents didn't happen, and that certain people never in fact met - he goes on to claim that Barker "purports that the events displayed on the stage, or something very like them, actually took place" and that he is exploiting his audience with "a tissue of sheer lies". This is, to say the least, disingenuous, since even Partington notes that Barker purports nothing of the sort, and least of all historical verisimilitude: his whole artistic credo revolts against such a conception of theatre. It also assumes that the audience of Barker's work is ignorant, malleable and credulous, which seems more than a little patronising.

If Partington takes his own strictures on historical accuracy seriously, he must disapprove of Shakespeare even more vehemently than Barker. It is generally accepted, to take an obvious example, that Richard III is a base libel of the historical Richard; for one thing, Richard didn't have a hump and, as English kings go, he was relatively just. As the director Richard Eyre says, "Shakespeare treats historical incident with little reference to fact - incidents are conflated, characters meet whose paths never crossed".² A historian who based her research on Shakespeare's history plays would be on somewhat shaky ground, and anyone who tried to argue his tragedies were historically accurate would be considered frankly insane. The verisimilitude of Shakespeare's play lies elsewhere, in what Barker describes as "emotional truths".

Barker openly and aggressively defends his right as an artist to make things up, to imagine rather than to represent reality; and he is clearly accurate in intuiting that this is a contemporary heresy. In this, he reflects Theodor Adorno's critique of the culture industry and its effect on human imagination. Speaking of boredom, Adorno says: "it is symptomatic of the deformations perpetrated upon man by the social totality, the most important of which is surely the defamation and atrophy of the imagination...those who want to adapt must learn increasingly to curb their imagination." ³ Clearly, Barker is maladaptive; but he is seldom boring.

Partington's defamation of imagination is not novel; after all, poets were to be banned from Plato's totalitarian Republic for their moral irresponsibility in fictionalising the truth. In Partington's world, the proper reasons for attending theatre are "to improve ... historical knowledge or cultural range", and he castigates Barker fiercely for refusing to fulfil at least one of these aims (I assume that a broader "cultural range" is a landscape which does not include such "travesties" as Victory).

Barker's view of theatre's function is rather more interesting. He doesn't believe theatre is there to convey messages, or to teach, or to entertain. Rather he sees theatre as a place which makes demands on an audience, in order to lead them into moral and emotional conflict and, through this conflict, to encounter a "hard won" freedom. "In a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity, complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound strength," he says. "The play which makes demands of its audience, both of an emotional and interpretive nature, becomes a source of freedom, necessarily hard won. The play which refuses the message, the lecture, the conscience-ridden expose, but which insists on the inventive and imaginative at every point, creates new tensions in a blandly entertainment-led culture. The dramatist's obligation is (to) his own imagination. His function becomes not to educate by his superior political knowledge, for who can trust that? but to lead into moral conflict by his superior imagination." ⁴

In the service of this idea, Barker has written plays which range from the mythic landscapes of classical antiquity to official and unofficial histories of the great massacres of the 20th century. He advocates a tragic, confrontational theatre, the "theatre of catastrophe", which is partly derived from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. It is a theatre in open conflict with the rationality of the humanist philosophy which has come to dominate British theatre practice, and which Barker has contemptuously labelled the "theatre of journalism".

The "theatre of journalism" is currently the major vehicle for left wing political dissent on the British stage. Companies like Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint and the Tricycle Theatre have dusted off the concept of documentary theatre, pioneered by companies like the Joint Stock Theatre Group in the '70s, and given it new life. Last year Out of Joint produced a documentary play by David Hare on the privatisation of British railways, and Tricycle have developed what they call "tribunal theatre", in which they theatricalise issues such as the Hutton Inquiry or the Stephen Lawrence murder, using only words which have been uttered by the participants. Their latest production, which closed a week ago, is Guantanamo: "Honour Bound to Defend Freedom", written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo from interviews with prisoners and others connected with Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. These have all been extremely successful examples of political theatre, popular and critically acclaimed, which have brought debate on issues such as the Iraq War squarely into the theatrical arena.

This strand of British theatre derives from the English Brechtian tradition, via a dose of Shaw. It is also a dominant philosophy behind much Australian play writing, from the productions of the Melbourne Workers Theatre to the mainstream plays of Hannie Rayson, who herself started in community theatre. And it is the kind of theatre which launches Howard Barker into his most provocative polemic mode.

He fulminates against "the drama of conscience", "a spectacle of relentless harmony" which he sees as merely preaching to the converted at the expense of artistic freedom and invention. "There is great safety and security to be enjoyed in the exchange of conscience-ridden observations, affirmations of shared values, humanistic platitudes," writes Barker. "But the stage remains essentially sterile, and the insistence on the representation of what passes for the real world only enhances the decadent sense of social responsibility while devastating the landscape of dramatic invention." Elsewhere in the same essay, he observes: "We swim in a tepid bath of humanistic accord, writer, actor, audience, an alliance of foregone conclusions which diminishes the possibility of innovative practice." ⁵

This deeply challenges Partington's strange claim that Victory is a polemic for the Australian republic because, in its unhistorical portrayal of the English Civil Wars, it seeks to expose the nastiness of English monarchs. The play is, in line with Barker's stated aesthetic, a rather more complicated experience than this simplistic agenda suggests (a major reason why I wonder whether Partington has actually seen it). In Barker's dystopia no one - monarchist or reformer - comes over well, and no message is parcelled out for theatre consumers to take home.

Barker's politics are by no means conservative, and Partington's attack is a not-untypical right wing reaction to Barker's work. And given that most mainstream British theatre is broadly liberal and humanistic - that is, precisely the kind of theatre on which Barker unleashes his hostility - perhaps the reasons for the relative paucity of productions of Barker's work in Britain become clear. Although his theatre is profoundly political, it is antagonistic to most shades of the ideological spectrum. He remains a radical and exciting playwright, a necessary grit in theatrical vision, a provocative inspiration. The only real question is why our own uncomfortable and innovative talents - writers, for example, like Margaret Cameron - remain marginalised within our theatre culture, while an artist like Barker is widely celebrated. If what we seek is a vital, exciting theatre, work like this is precisely where public money ought to go.


Links

Howard Barker
LIFT inquiry on theatre, Independent

Notes

1 Pyrrhic Victory, Geoffrey Partington, Quadrant, June 2004
2 Utopia and other places, Richard Eyre, Vintage 1994
3 Free Time, TW Adorno, The Culture Industry, Routledge Classics, 1991
4 The Politics Beyond the Politics, Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, Manchester University Press 1993
5 A bargain with impossibility: the theatre of speculation in an age of accord, ibid.