have just finished reading Howard Barker's Arguments for a Theatre -- though it might be just as accurate to say that the book finished me.  Barker has been described as "the most terrifying export since the football hooligan," and just as the hooligan stomps hob-nail-booted through the garden of social nicities, Barker is lancingly acidic about what he sees as the homogenizing effect of the British national and commercial theatre establishment on ideas, actions, audiences, and culture.  (Though Barker speaks specifically about Britain, with slight modifications his comments can apply to the American theatre establishment as well.)  In Barker's view, this regime of "massaging theatre" needs to be defenestrated completely by what he calls his "Theatre of Catastrophe" so that real theatre, a "tragic theatre," can again breathe.  I do not know how much of Barker I agree with, but I know that I have encountered a set of ideas and arguments that I simply cannot dismiss as eccentric or unsuitable for a seat at the table.

Barker's theory of a catastrophic theatre first has to be seen against what he believes is the state of contemporary theatre, which he variously labels as "populist" or "humanist" or "liberal":

The sterility of the contemporary theatre...follows from the theatre's
sense of itself as an industry with a market, on the one hand, or a
social service with a popular obligation, on the other....
Both of these positions require that the dramatist satisfy an audience
in its perceived demands -- entertainment or education.  In attempting
to satisfy these demands, the theatre slavishly performs functions more
efficiently provided elsewhere and diminishes its particular power,
poetry, the spoken voice, the hypnotism of the actor.

To Barker, this kind of "market" theatre is aligned with an authoritarian culture (masked as a democracy) dedicated to making every secret of its populace open and transparent in order to better police them, what he calls "light as a regime."  A theatre that seeks to "throw light" on the subjects it engages is, in Barker's analysis, complicitous in this social control.

Complicitous how?  First, by lucidity and clarity.  The "dazzled culture [in the regime of light]...requires of art that it is -- lucid.  And if the text is to be lucid, the production must make its first ambition -- clarity." Critics and audiences insist on these "virtues" because they lead to the "elimination of the unhealthy state of not-knowing," that is, a state of darkness, which could also be the home of secrets, sordidness, and "narratives it finds unpalatable."  Second, by message. "The liberal theatre wants to give messages" because that is the inevitable pay-off of lucidity and clarity in conception and production.  These messages, "redolent of earnestness, responsibility, legislative/poetic romanticism" are a "sort of fake heroism" designed to offer the "great safety and security... of conscience-ridden observations, affirmations of shared values, humanistic platitudes" geared to "the spectacle of relentless harmony."

Third, the message delivered by lucidity and clarity must be delivered by means of "the realist discourse," which Barker identifies with naturalism or realism in the theatre (he does not make distinctions between the two).  Realism "presupposes a moral weakness in the audience, which must be presented with positive landmarks, like posts in an estuary, if it is not to be dangerously lost in the wastes of imagination."  "Real" speech, structured narratives, recognition, mirror held up to nature leading to "instant meaning" -- all of these devices and more must be used in order to make sure the audience does not get lost in imagination and comes to the "consensus of conscience and critique" embedded in the drama as required by the regime of light.

When all of these elements are combined, the "Theatre of Conscience," as Barker calls it, "moves inexorably towards an art of anodyne humanism, in which the actors and the audience tacitly collaborate in an act of 'saying' and the theatre diminishes itself in the pursuit of the limited objective of communicating an idea...Behind this lies the notion of the author as a 'good' man or woman, whose trade is principally the dispensing of wisdom and whose vocation is the creation of harmony."  The theatre thus created serves the interests of the larger regime by fostering an ersatz sense of moral accord and downplaying or destroying (through criticism and the market) any use of the theatre for moral speculation outside the "consensus."

Barker's antidote to what he calls the "populist" or "humanist" or "liberal" theatre?  The re-placement of the pain of tragedy at the heart of the theatrical experience.  Barker defines tragedy as

the most illegitimate of all art forms, the most devastating to
social orders and consequently, the most de-civilizing, the darkest
and yet simultaneously the most life-affirming, for precisely by
standing so close to the rim of the abyss it delivers expression to the
inexpressible, and stages emotions the so-called open society
finds it almost impossible to contemplate.

He continues: "The secret of tragedy -- its inviolable secret -- its terrible power of dislocation -- lies in the forbidden knowledge that...citizens have a fatal susceptibility to instincts which are perfectly incompatible with collective discipline."  The "spectacle of human pain, of charismatic defeat that constitutes the fascination and strength" of tragedy is not pessimism or despair but the first steps, through "transgression" and "trespass," on a journey "intended to plunge beneath the ground of common belief and to test the ground of first principles."

This "anti-humanist" theatre will honor the independence of its audience by making no "compact" with it as to "entertainment, ideological instruction, humanist celebration or changed perceptions."  Instead, inside the theatrical black box, which takes its "immense spiritual authority from the simple question ‘what if...?'", where "the imagination is wild and tragic,...its criminality unfettered [and] the unspeakable is spoken," the audience will be invited to turn from being "potential critics into collaborators and accomplices in an illicit act." Inevitably, by replacing a moral accord between author and audience with a call to simultaneous moral speculation (which may or may not even have resolution, coherence, or legitimacy), Barker's catastrophic theatre will not "[offer] the reward...[but] will deliver the wound" of greater insight and complicity.  The audience, so touched, "will endure the wound as a man drawn from a swamp endures the pain of the rope."

In a nutshell, the Theatre of Catastrophe "addresses itself to those who suffer the maiming of the imagination" and who have a desire, articulated or not, "for the restitution of moral speculation, which is the business of theatre."  He continues:

The Theatre of Catastrophe is therefore a theatre for the offended....
[It] is rooted in the idea of the soul, not as immortal form, not as a
thing immune from damage, but as innate knowledge of other life. 
In some, this knowledge is nothing more than a cherished hoard
of stereotypes...[In] others, the Soul breaks with all images it senses
corrupt or annexed by ideology (harmony, family, the public)...
The Theatre of Catastrophe addresses these imperatives of the
Soul [and] abhors reconciliation which is not won at terrible cost.

He ends by saying that this kind of theatre "demands more of its audience than all existing theatre."

"Demands," in fact, may be too mild a word for what Barker has in mind.  "Extracts" or "extrudes" might be better.  To Barker, the only way a tragic theatre can help its audience go beyond conventional pieties into the darker places that are the home of "irrationality which is also home to desire" is through pain.  His tragic theatre "declares pain is not only inevitable, it calls it necessary [and] makes a passion of pain" because the pain of the tragic theatre dissolves the soporifics dispensed by the liberal humanist society and its attendant theatre.   The "ordeal of the audience must be the first intention of the tragic theatre and the howling sound of breaking and strained strings its first polyphony."  Only through this ordeal in a theatre not infected by light and promising no relief from an existence predicated on pain and suffering can people reach deeply enough into themselves to recover their own humanity, establish a preserve of privacy uninvaded by the transparent society, and re-connect with their own sources of desire and imagination by rejecting those inflicted on them by commerce and liberalism.

As is clear by now, Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe is committed to smashing the usual bonds between artist, actor, and audience so that something else can emerge -- something anarchic and barbarous and steeped in pain, yet also because of that, unsparingly real and scathingly beautiful. And this is done to scourge people of the suffocating conformity imposed on them by society so that they can access their "pre-moral" selves and experience "the ecstasy of moral uncertainty."

In terms of specific practices in the theatre of tragedy, Barker first insists upon creating a language that is as far away from natural speech as possible, a language that "breaks the bonds of the real, disrupts the familiar, scattered syntax of naturalism,...and draws the audience into a state of intoxication."  Once the ear is cleansed of "its domestic associations," the audience member will be able to hear, and then to speak, the "language of secrets...a form which brings to the surface -- erupts from beneath the surface -- the normally unspoken, the counter-discourse, the private."

His staging suggestions, just as with his language, are designed to break audiences' expectations about what theatre "is" and thus open up new possibilities for feeling and understanding.  Instead of narrative comprehensibility, Barker wants to "deny narrative its authority by resorting to digression."  Instead of "alienation effects" devised to engage rationality, Barker wants to use alienating effects to actually alienate, as when he uses something like a completely unreliable chorus in his play Golgo.  Instead of a "well-made" play, Barker will job in unthreaded elements, such as prologues which do not introduce the action, parables whose messages have nothing to do with the play's actions, and unprovoked sound effects (such as the ghostly laughter in The Last Supper) that force an audience to speculate about meaning and connection.  In short, Barker's stage practices disrupt normal expectations of theatre so that the audience, de-barnacled of its crust of expectations, can be in the position to experience something unexpected and eruptive.

But what about that pain thing?  Sounds very much like "painfor your own good!"  And, to be sure, there is a lot of that in Barker, just as there was in Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.  All those accumulated expectations of decades of naturalistic theatre practice, abetted by the state, must be stripped away if we, as individuals, are ever going to be able to re-gain access to those fundamental sources of identity and will that define the "human" of human being.

This stripping away cannot be done without pain, but I do not believe Barker's "pain" is either masochistic or sadistic in nature, despite the pungency and spikiness of his descriptions.  Instead, I think Barker means "pain" in a transformative sense, the pain that might be felt when an old skin exfoliates and the nerves of the newly exposed skin burn in the barrage of heretofore denied or dulled sensations (what Barker called the "wound").  However, for humans discarding the old skin does not happen easily -- it does not come simply because the season of ripeness has been reached: it is not passive and it is not organic.  That painful ripeness -- which in other contexts Barker calls "beauty" -- must be reached by an act of will, and Barker wants to provide in his theatre a means by which that will to transformation can be rehearsed, experienced, and quite possibly accomplished.

Through this theatrical sense of pain, terror, anxiety, and beauty, Barker sees himself as re-humanizing theatre, bringing it back to an essential state that has been corrupted by liberalism.  He denies Aristotle's promotion of pity and terror as purgative (he calls the principles of catharsis and mimesis "suffocating" because they simply reinforce the suppressions of the collectivity) and Horace's call for delight and instruction (he asserts "unequivocally...the abnegation of use-value" for the theatre).  To bring individuals to the threshold of both the abyss and beauty of their own liberty, theatre must reach

for its banished powers -- pain, poetry, and the actor's voice -- [and]
discover in chaos and in pain the substance of social disorder, for the
irony of art was always this, that it lent power to the powerless by its
embracing of the forbidden, not by its reiteration of collective norms. 
Theatre for what, therefore?  For nothing, for no end...like all great arts,
for itself alone, and the tragedy is written because it cannot tolerate the
strain of silence anymore.

Barker's is not an easy theatre.  Some will be repelled, some confused and disheartened.  But some, like the woman in the First Prologue of The Bite Of The Night, will return, not because of what they find, but because of what they don't find:

And she listened to everything
Understanding some things
But not others
Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again said

If that's art I think it is hard work
It was beyond me
So much of it beyond my actual life

But something troubled her
Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said...

And in the light again said

That is art, it is hard work

And one friend said, too hard for me
And other said if you will
I will come again

Because I found it hard I felt honoured

For Barker, in that woman's "not-finding" begins all manner of possibilities for liberation, moral speculation, individual rebellion, and stringent beauties.  The catastrophe that Barker wants to spark, the "wound" he wants to inflict, is like the violence of a volcanic explosion: the ripping apart of the existing topography creating new soils, a dying that also brings life back to life.

* * * * *

Is Barker my new be-all and end-all?  The academic part of my brain deals out all sorts of defenses and critiques that pick apart the inevitable lacks and obsessions of Barker's essays.  But this dissing game is not sufficient or even relevant.  Barker's attack on contemporary theatre is meant to be electro-shock without therapeutic rationale.  Electrical words inserted like probes deeply, and savagely, into long-dried-out muscles carry a voltage of vitriol and cutting common sense until the muscles either recall their strengths and move,move, move -- or frag into dust.

I have not yet decided how far to let this beast into the house of my own writing, since, as my other essays clearly show, I possess that inclination to teach and heal that Barker wants to oblivion.  And, all truth being told, I would like to succeed in the terms set by the business Barker detests -- and "Barkerizing" my writing is a sure way to derail that.

But he doesn't go away; he nags and itches like a thistle burr. The pressure of the hooligan boot against the face makes Barker's manifesto have that "vaunted" edge that so many contemporary works say they have but don't.  And I cannot deny categorically -- as much as I would like to -- that the crunch of boot against cheekbone is completely unpleasant. Shiver down the spine: who knows where that kind of thinking will lead?  Perhaps better to just write what makes for comfort and success...  Yes, yes, of course...  But then there is that jeweled serrated beast pacing outside the latched house -- and the locks ache to open.

© 2001 Michael Bettencourt

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
 produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
  Continued thanks to his "prime mate"
and wife, Maria-Beatriz

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