Howard Barker is one of the most revered and, in his native England at least, most neglected of contemporary dramatists.
As the prolific author of such outstanding plays as The Europeans and The Castle, his highly poetic, often deeply morally ambiguous, plays have attracted the almost universal hostility of the English critical establishment but the respect of some of the finest actors and theatre directors. Dominic Hill of Glasgow's Citizens Theatre describes him as "arguably our greatest living dramatist".
Hugh Hodgart – long-time director, acting teacher and current dean of drama and dance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) in Glasgow – is in no doubt where he stands on the question of Barker's greatness. Since 1986, when he directed Victory (Barker's play set during the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660) for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (as the RCS then was), Hodgart has overseen the production of no fewer than 14 Barkers, 12 of which he has directed himself.
From Thursday to Saturday this coming week, Glasgow's Tron Theatre will play host to final-year acting students from the RCS in the 13th and 14th of those productions. Hodgart will direct Victory for the first time in 27 years, while former Citizens Theatre co-director Guy Hollands will stage the extraordinary series of theatrical vignettes known as The Possibilities.
For Hodgart, as a director and teacher, presenting student actors with a Barker play is rather like offering them a drama by Shakespeare: "Barker is a poet and a historian, and that's expressed through his writing. You have to approach the work rather like you'd approach Shakespeare. There are rhythms and tunes there. Once you start to value the language, you find that the action is encoded in the words. The actors find that they really have to work with Barker. There's nowhere to hide and you can't make easy assumptions about what motivates characters and the meanings of things."
Hodgart disagrees with those who suggest that Barker's theatre is too intellectual or wilfully obscure: "Nothing could be further from the truth. The plays are incredibly visceral, emotional and mythic."
Barker should be considered alongside the very greatest dramatists, the director believes. He cites the political ambiguities in Victory as an example of Barker's dramatic power: "In this play, the poet Milton says of revolution, 'when the war is won, wage war on the victors '. It's an absolutely terrifying comment on the unending nature of the human struggle.
"It's like Chekhov," Hodgart suggests. "He absolutely refused to plough the straightforward, liberal humanist, anti-Czarist furrow. He was looking at life in a much broader, more problematic, way. That's exactly what Barker's doing, too."
Barker's theatre stands, says the director, against "the dead hand of Hollywood realism. Something has happened in the past 100 years that has made us fearful of drama which is poetic, ambiguous and metaphorical". With its latest productions, the RCS is offering audiences a powerful alternative to the realism of most cinema and TV drama: theatre which, in the words of Barker himself, "restores poetry to speech".
Victory and The Possibilities are at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, May 30 to June 1, www.tron.co.uk. Mark Brown will chair a panel discussion with Hugh Hodgart and other members of the company following the matinee performance of Victory on June 1.
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