Barker: Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; The Road, The House, The Road
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 burbaning 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.

"1138568504"
Barker: Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; The Road, The House, The Road
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 burbaning 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.

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Barker: Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; The Road, The House, The Road

Barker: Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; The Road, The House, The Road

by Howard Barker
Barker: Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; The Road, The House, The Road

Barker: Plays Four: I Saw Myself; The Dying of Today; Found in the Ground; The Road, The House, The Road

by Howard Barker

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Overview

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 burbaning 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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781840028515
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 06/01/2009
Series: Oberon Modern Playwrights
Pages: 270
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Howard Barker is an internationally renowned dramatist, whose first plays were performed at the Royal Court and by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since 1992 his work has been presented by his own company The Wrestling School. Barker's theatre is characterized by its poetic, non-naturalistic form and inhabits worlds of contradiction, suffering and sexual passion. Barker is also a poet and theorist of theatre, whose 'Theatre of Catastrophe' defines a new form of tragedy for our times.
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