Howard Barker: Politics and Desire

DAVID IAN RABEY is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and a dramatist, director and performer. His numerous critical publications include English Drama Since 1940, Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (as co-editor) and Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death. He has directed and/or acted in eleven Barker productions to date, including performing the role of Isonzo in Barker's own production of The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo. He is an Associate of Barker's theatre company, The Wrestling School.

• Contents Acknowledgements Foreword to the Paperback Edition Chronology Lubricating Progress through the Forbidden Innocence and Authority Independence and the Family Between Two Worlds New Manner for New Situation Landscapes of Shame, Eruptions of Desire Splintered Faith and Scar Tissue Power and the Body Every Man's Evil Expresses Me Pain and Breakthrough Catastrophe is also Birth: Inconclusion Appendix: Conversations Notes Bibliography Index

'Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker's lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry... At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.' - James D. Balestrieri, Theatre Three'Rabey's criticism in these books offers a meditation, a critical and lyrical vision, not merely of Barker's theatre but of theatre's place in a 21st-century culture' - George Hunka, Superfluities: A Journal