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WRAP THESIS Groves 2014.Pdf University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/72932 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Sacred Tragedy An Exploration into the Spiritual Dimension of the Theatre of Howard Barker By Peter Anthony Groves Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre Studies School of Theatre, Performance & Cultural Policy Studies The University of Warwick December 2014 Table of Contents Page Illustrations 5 Acknowledgements 6 Declaration 7 Abstract 8 Chapter 1: Introduction: Howard Barker and Religion 10 Tragedy and Religion 15 Barker’s crisis of faith 17 Barker and Genesis: return to the beginning 21 Christian redemption and class in Barker’s theatre 26 A Religion of Sexuality 34 Religion and sexual desire in The Castle 37 Apocalypse and Rebirth in The Europeans 40 Atheism and Truth in the Theatre of Catastrophe 46 Structure and Methodology 54 Barker Studies and Sacred Tragedy 58 Chapter 2: Making Faith from God’s Absence 62 Mysticism, Meister Eckhart and the Art of Theatre Atheism, Mysticism and Barker 64 Eckhart’s Theology 73 Eckhart’s The One 79 Barker’s ‘the one’ 87 Sheer Detachment 91 Eckhart and the plays of Howard Barker 95 2 The Bite of the Night: An Education 100 Let Me 105 13 Objects: Studies in Servitude 109 Negative Capability and The Ecstatic Bible 115 Chapter 3: Sacred Theatre and Greek Tragedy 125 Sacred Tragedy 128 Rationalism and Tragedy 134 Dionysus and Tragedy 146 The religious matrix of Athenian tragedy 151 The subjectivity of the tragic protagonist 165 Music and Nietzsche’s Tragedy 187 Chapter 4: Performance and Darkness 189 Visions of Hades and the Dead Theatre as Religion 189 Encounters with the dead: Nekyia and Katabasis 194 Choruses of the dead 209 Light and darkness and the tragic space 237 Ancient mystery cult and tragic drama 244 Eleusinian mystery cult 253 Performing death 258 Dead Hands 265 Death in female form 273 The Road, the House, the Road 281 Chapter 5: Mythic conceptions of the female in 291 Greek tragedy and the Theatre of Catastrophe The female in Greek tragedy 292 3 Female desire in Greek tragedy 300 The mythic female as a source of seduction and deception 310 The Witch in the Theatre of Catastrophe 316 The Maenad and tragic dissolution 325 The destruction of domestic order 330 The Maenad in Hamlet: Gertrude – The Cry 333 Helen of Troy: the phantom of the ideal female 340 Clytemnestra – Helen’s sister 344 Barker’s Helen of Troy and the formation of ‘the one’ 346 Helen’s daughter and the formation of ideology 365 Chapter 6: Conclusion 372 Appendix: The Wrestling School Interviews 381 Interview with Gerrard McArthur 381 Interview with Jane Bertish 395 Bibliography 398 4 Illustrations Figure 1: Dead Hands, Robert Workman 2004 Page 264 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Nadine Holdsworth and Professor Janelle Reinelt for their supervision and guidance throughout the whole process. I would also like to thank Gerrard McArthur and Jane Bertish of The Wrestling School for taking part in the interviews on Howard Barker’s theatre. Thanks are also due to Richard Perkins, the subject librarian for the department of Theatre Studies, for rapidly locating difficult to find sources. I would like to thank staff and colleagues at Brooksby Melton College for supporting my research during this long process. A special thank you is due to Eluned Owen, Henrietta Roberts and Lynn Barrett. I would also like to thank Dr Neal Swettenham for feedback on aspects of my research. My brother Dr Roger Groves has been highly supportive throughout the whole project, always finding time to discuss any issues and guide me in the challenging process of PhD research. I would also like to thank my brother Denis Groves and mother Joan Groves for their support. Finally I would like to thank Melissa and James for always being there to do something completely different when I needed a break from study. 6 Declaration This thesis is submitted to the University of Warwick in support of my application for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. It has been composed by myself and has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. 7 Abstract Although Barker began in the early 1970s as a Marxist satirical playwright, by 2005 his approach had shifted in focus to such an extent that he felt able to define his theatre as having ‘many of the characteristics of a religion.’ This study investigates the relationship between Barker’s theatre and religious and spiritual ideas, focusing on two key influences: the medieval Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart and religious and mythic elements of ancient Greek tragedy. Barker’s dramatic engagement with Abrahamic monotheism reveals his interest in early biblical portrayals of God and his appropriation of dominant Christian tropes, notably apocalypse and rebirth. The specific influence of Eckhart’s apophatic theology, his Neoplatonic conception of the One and his doctrine of ‘detachment’ are shown to inform aspects of Barker’s work, including his theoretical text Death, The One and the Art of Theatre. Greek tragedy is examined as a religious and ritual event, establishing parallels with Barker’s view of tragedy as a sacred art that challenges rational and moral ideals by generating ecstatic emotions through an imagined proximity to death. Greek narratives that centre on an encounter with the dead, nekyia and katabasis, are explored in connection with Barker’s drama, along with ritual initiation in Greek mystery cult. Finally there is an investigation into the immoral, ecstatic, erotic, and thanatic aspects of the female protagonist in Greek tragedy and how these aspects of the tragic female continue and are appropriated in Barker’s contemporary tragedy. Eckhartian mystical theology and elements of classical tragic spirituality help to give Barker’s theatre a unique and mysterious dimension. The recurring antagonistic female archetype of ‘the one’ in Barker’s drama expresses core aspects of this spirituality: sexual ecstasy, proximity to death, and detachment from morality and ideology. 8 Tragedy is a sacred art. Howard Barker 9 Chapter 1 Introduction: Howard Barker and Religion God’s silence is too terrible for men. (Howard Barker, The Ecstatic Bible, 2004b, p. 168) Howard Barker’s professional writing career began in 1970 and he was part of a significant wave of post 1968 British playwriting that produced provocative socialist drama, clearly influenced by Brecht’s Marxist epic theatre and the British post-war interest in social realism.1 However, in the early 1980s Barker started to question his own political beliefs and this led to increased scepticism about the merits of using theatre as a medium to present socialist ideology. In 1986 Barker published an article in The Guardian entitled ‘Forty- nine Asides for a Tragic Theatre’ where he declared that, ‘We are living the extinction of official socialism. When the opposition loses its politics, it must root in art’ (Barker 1989, p. 11). The ‘art’ that Barker chooses to root his oppositional politics in is tragedy, a theatrical form that he argues allows access to a deeper sense of existential truth beyond or beneath political ideology, as Barker explains: 1 The first professional play was One Afternoon on the 63rd Level of the Pyramid of Cheops the Great (1970) for BBC Radio. An iconic example of post-war social realism is of course John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956. Sean Carney argues that the fusion of these two styles leads to a new tragic form, ‘contemporary English tragedy grows out of this hybrid birth, the conjunction of realistic content and formal theatricality’ (Carney 2013, p. 7). 10 Tragedy offends the sensibilities. It drags the unconscious into the public place. It therefore silences the banging of the tambourine which characterises the authoritarian and the labourist culture alike. (Barker 1989, p. 13) This engagement with tragedy rapidly led to the formation of ‘a modern form of tragedy’ (Barker 1989, p. 53), which Barker named the ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’ and by 1988 a new theatre company was formed, The Wrestling School, solely dedicated to the staging of Barker’s contemporary tragic texts.2 In 1989, the first of three editions of a manifesto that sets out Barker’s vision for his contemporary version of tragic drama was published under the title Arguments for a Theatre. As Barker moved away from socialist satirical theatre towards tragedy, the plays expressed a growing interest in religious and spiritual subject matter. Whereas his dramas of the 1970s were preoccupied with twentieth century and contemporary politics, his plays of the 1980s increasingly searched further back into European history as a way of reassessing the present. As a character in Barker’s first Theatre of Catastrophe play (Barker 2007, p. 33), The Europeans, explains, ‘to know who we are, we must know who we were’ (Barker 1990c, p. 29). It seems to be this sustained engagement with 2 The Theatre of Catastrophe is first referred to in an article in The Guardian on 22 August 1988 entitled ‘The Consolations of Catastrophe’, explaining the vision for this new theatrical form (Barker 1989, p. 51-55). The Wrestling School’s first production was Barker’s The Last Supper, which opened on 3 March 1988 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, directed by Kenny Ireland (Barker 1988c). 11 European history and myth and Barker’s disenchantment with politics that contribute to the spiritual and religious sensibility in his plays.
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