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A Style and Its Origins
By Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth
Oberon Books £10
119 pages
Dateline: 23rd August, 2007
This quasi-biographical book is quite one of the oddest that one is
ever likely to come across. It is theoretically a book by Howard Barker
about his life and work, written with the assistance of a collaborator,
Eduardo Houth.
However, the "/" between the names speaks volumes, since
Houth is in fact a useful nom de plume to disguise the fact that
the person writing in the third person is also the playwright himself.
This begs many questions but Barker has a reputation for inventing alter
egos, for example to design sets and costumes.
In this way, Barker is able to write an apologia that seeks
to justify many of the artistic decisions that he has made in a long
career, which many might regard as one of unfulfilled promise, but he
sees as completely successful, eschewing public acclaim (and in some
cases presence at all) to maintain his artistic integrity.
In the early years, Barker made his way as a playwright much like any
other, though somewhat avant-garde. Gradually though, he became more
and more a solitary figure battling against the establishment and railing
against former colleagues.
He set up The Wrestling School to produce his work and eventually became
a director, designer and pretty much everything else apart from joining
the onstage team. There he was lucky enough to find a dedicated team
who would work, presumably, for little money, ensuring that his plays
reached the stage in pristine condition.
In a couple of cases, they also entered into closer partnerships, with
first Melanie Jessop and then Victoria Wicks having affairs with the
writer that interacted with their stage work. Barker's admiration of
Miss Wicks in particular knows no bounds. At times, his writing about
her becomes both romantic and complimentary at levels that any normal
reader might regard as excessive. Such is love.
The canon is also considered from an iconoclastic viewpoint, which
is reasonable since, if Howard Barker/Eduardo Houth did not know what
the writer was trying to achieve, who would? At times, he/he is able
to defend plays from those awful critics who failed to understand them
and it is suggested did not even try to do so.
A Style and Its Origins is, like its author, a book of extremes.
Barker is capable of excessive schadenfreude attacking those
that had once been his friends and supporters as easily as softer targets
representing cultural normality who did not get on with his work. At
the other extreme, collaborators whom he loves and believes in get lauded
to the high hills for their efforts in his plays.
Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe is not to everybody's taste
although a work like Scenes from an Execution will live on as
a classic when much of his other work is long forgotten. One has to
feel that eventually, this writer's work became fuelled as much by a
desire to avoid fitting into cultural norms as any other motivation.
Strangely, a book that sounds unreadable turns out to be thoroughly
entertaining and should help anyone interested in Howard Barker's work
to understand both the man and what he has spent his whole life writing
about. A Style and Its Origins is hardly a conventional autobiography
nor is it pure technical analysis. However, as a one-off, it is well
worth the investment.
Philip Fisher
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