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ARGUMENTS FOR ATHEATRE. By Howard Barker. Third edition. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997; pp. 233. $24.95 paper.
HOWARD BARKER'S THEATRE OF SEDUCTION. By Charles Lamb. Contemporary Theatre Studies, vol. 19. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997; pp. xii + 153. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.
Of the handful of significant dramatists to emerge from the British political theatre of the 1970s, Howard Barker is perhaps the least well known on this side of the Atlantic. This may be attributed to the fact that his reputation as an actor's playwright is eclipsed by the negative critical reception he consistently receives from the British press, who often dismiss him as an eccentric and elitist nihilist who composes difficult and obscure plays. Barker began writing theoretical texts in 1986 as a response to this critical confusion. The manifestos, aphorisms, and interviews gathered as Arguments for a Theatre together with Charles Lamb's theoretical approach to Barker's plays provide a powerful case against this dismissal.
The third edition of Arguments adds twelve texts written since the second edition The new expansion is a testament to Barker's continued growth as a writer for and of the theatre in the four years between editions. The range of positions he maintains is reflected in the list of names he gives to his project(s) throughout Arguments: Tragic Theatre, Theatre of Secrets, the Unrecognizable Theatre, Theatre of Obscurity, a theatre of Anti-Parable, Theatre of Infection, and most frequently and definitively, Theatre of Catastrophe. The composite image conveyed via this list of names achieves greater definition through contrast with the names he gives to their antitheses: the Humanist Theatre, Theatre of Conscience, Theatre of Criticism or Critical Theatre, Political Theatre, Populist Theatre, Theatre of Saying, Theatre of Solutions, and the Illuminated Theatre. Barker's list of antagonists includes Aristotle, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Shaw, and Brecht. In other words, he decries the evolution of the writer's role in the Western dramatic tradition, because "in ceasing to be a poet, the dramatist became a playwright, an artisan rather than a visionary" (150).
If it is inappropriate to call Barker a playwright, it is perhaps fitting to use "tragedian." In the (new) preface, he claims that in Arguments, "tragedy ... is being uttered here, as one...