Death, The One and the Art of Theatre (ePub)

"in this deceptively slight volume, Howard Barker writes with an unprecedented emotional immediacy and arc of conceptual ambition.... Death, the One and the Art of Theatre represents an important advance on Arguments for a Theatre ... surpassing even the range and depth of the earlier collection.... A landmark achievement" - David Ian Rabey, University of Wales Aberystwyth
Howard Barker is an internationally renowned playwright whose works are regularly produced throughout Europe and the US. He is widely known for his controversial and satirical explorations into contemporary tragedy, and his anti-Brechtian focus on the irrational and the catastrophic. He is often credited as a major influence on the generation of playwrights which includes Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill.
Death, the One and the Art of Theatre is the latest collection of Barker's distinctive and revelatory philosophical musings on theatre. It is a stunning array of speculations, deductions, prose poems and poetic apercus, which cast a unique and unflinching light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, "love" and theatre. Exploring the juncture between aesthetics and metaphysics, the books looks at the human experience of love and death as life at its most intrinsically theatrical. It is a profoundly unsettling and inspiring piece of writing which extends Barker's challenge to orthodox morality first presented in "Arguments for a Theatre"-which he described as men and women's secret longing for the incomprehensible nature of pain.