Post by joem on Oct 13, 2017 23:39:24 GMT
I've been wanting to see The Loud Boy's Life by Barker for a long time but in its absence this had to do.
Is Howard Barker, despite not being commercially very successful in this country, an important playwright? On the strength of this the answer has to be a resounding "No!" for the very simple reason that this is a pretty pointless exercise. Barker is known for having a certain amount of contempt for his audience, perhaps his "neglect" by UK theatres is based on the fact that there is little dramatic interest in works such as this? For two hours characters do the things we expect characters to do on stage: Laugh, cry, shout, gesture... but it is empty... these are not rounded characters in any sense, they are characters only in the sense that they are on stage and are not the actors who are playing them. You feel nothing for them.
The Castle could have lasted for five minutes or gone on for ever and you still would have got no more sense from it because it seems as though the playwright is determine for any sense to be subservient to his vision, whatever that might be. Ostensibly about men returning from the Crusades to find a village now ran by their women and wanting to regain their position by building a castle, the stilted language plays at being epic but lapses into constant modern slang. The playwright may want to examine power-play but this is theatre, if you're not writing something dramatic write a treatise. Or a poem. Or anything which does not require engaging an audience who've paid for the privilege of being there.
The cast do what they can but this is very, very poor material.
Is Howard Barker, despite not being commercially very successful in this country, an important playwright? On the strength of this the answer has to be a resounding "No!" for the very simple reason that this is a pretty pointless exercise. Barker is known for having a certain amount of contempt for his audience, perhaps his "neglect" by UK theatres is based on the fact that there is little dramatic interest in works such as this? For two hours characters do the things we expect characters to do on stage: Laugh, cry, shout, gesture... but it is empty... these are not rounded characters in any sense, they are characters only in the sense that they are on stage and are not the actors who are playing them. You feel nothing for them.
The Castle could have lasted for five minutes or gone on for ever and you still would have got no more sense from it because it seems as though the playwright is determine for any sense to be subservient to his vision, whatever that might be. Ostensibly about men returning from the Crusades to find a village now ran by their women and wanting to regain their position by building a castle, the stilted language plays at being epic but lapses into constant modern slang. The playwright may want to examine power-play but this is theatre, if you're not writing something dramatic write a treatise. Or a poem. Or anything which does not require engaging an audience who've paid for the privilege of being there.
The cast do what they can but this is very, very poor material.
