Bøger af Howard Barker

The theatre of Howard Barker subverts myth and invents history in its pursuit of the meaning of individual integrity. Repudiating politics and asserting the primacy of the emotions, Barker's tragedy is written in a language by turns poetic and brutally mundane. The effects are disconcerting and destabilizing, as he insists tragedy must be. The twelfth and final collection of plays from this celebrated, influential and widely-studied playwright includes:At Her Age and Hers, which uses Velázquez's painting Las Meninas to meditate on the making of a work of art, removing the figures from the frame, animating them, and assembling them again.Landscape with Cries, which invokes the savagery of the Peasants' Revolt of fourteenth-century France to create an unlikely heroine. Womanly, a play which is alternatively dreamlike and nightmarish in its biography of Elbow, the aptly named protagonist who defies the conventional morals of her day. Four Dialogues which are small in size of cast, but ambitious in their confrontations with the ideas of faith, language, and longing. Struggling to define their needs, the characters come near to the final purpose of Barker's dramatic endeavour - the discovery of a reason to exist.True Condition - both the title of the play and the name of an unseaworthy vessel - which tells of the final voyage of a boat crewed by criminals.

This is the latest collection of Barker's revelatory philosophical musings on theatre. It is an array of speculations, deductions and prose poems, which cast a unique light on the nature of theatre.

An essential item for all those who are concerned with modern British theater, including students, academics, and practitioners.

The loss of faith and cynical corruption of the few priests left at the Abbey of Calcetto is unexpectedly challenged by the arrival of a young man with an unsullied and passionate belief in God. The boy Loftus gradually acquires a huge moral ascendancy through the intensity and purity of his faith, but he is then brutally punished by the priests.

Howard Barker does not accept the conventions of what he terms "The Establishment Theatre". These writings on the nature of theatre reject the constraints of "objective" academic theatre criticism, but explore the collision and collusion of intellect and artistry in the creative act.