Oberon Books, 2010

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 2, Roles: Total (9), Female (5), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...Barker's radical rewriting of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya brought him more controversy than most of his other works put together. Interrogating not so much Chekhov's text as the use to which society has put it, Barker turns Vanya's defeat...

Oberon Books, 2012

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (17), Female (11), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...Can you tell the difference between a genius and an idiot? If the world treats the genius as an idiot, it can be difficult for the genius to tell the difference. Especially if the genius is a 12-year-old child. In 12 Encounters...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 13

...13 Objects movingly reveals the investment we make in inanimate things, their power to unsettle us, and how their talismanic qualities license new ways of seeing the world. Howard Barker is one of the most significant...

Oberon Books, 2020

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Scenes: 4, Roles: Total (5), Female (2), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...Barker's theatre has never sought to reproduce the real world on stage, but 1870 is the first of his plays to be set in Hell. An executed traitor, whose passion for betrayal is akin to a faith, meets other victims of that terrible year...

Oberon Books, 2010

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 2, Roles: Total (8), Female (1), Male (7), Unassigned (0)

...A House of Correction is a meditation on cause and effect. Set on the eve of a war which may destroy a society, the seemingly arbitrary arrival of a messenger with a vital communication sets off an agonizing train of events in the lives...

Oberon Books, 2018

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Roles: Total (17), Female (5), Male (12), Unassigned (0)

...In Ahno, A Prince of Now, a youthful dictator is revealed as simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary, in politics and in love. His shocking efforts to create a new social order are mirrored in his unconventional passion...

Oberon Books, 2006

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 23, Roles: Total (21), Female (6), Male (15), Unassigned (0)

...Animals in Paradise was commissioned by the Swedish and Danish governments to celebrate their connection by bridge, a symbolic finish to centuries of antagonism. Barker's unexpected treatment of the theme provoked unrest on its first...

Methuen Drama, 2022

Modern Plays

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Scenes: 16, Roles: Total (8), Female (5), Male (3), Unassigned (0)

...At Her Age and Hers, which uses Velázquez's painting Las Meninas to meditate on the making of a work of art, removing the figures from the frame, animating them, and assembling them again...

Oberon Books, 2011

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 104, Roles: Total (16), Female (4), Male (6), Unassigned (6)

...Howard Barker’s theatre is characterized by its tragic scale and its distinctive way of exposing the unconscious resistances that underlie apparent social unanimity, both in the sexual and political spheres. Barker’s play...

Oberon Books, 2014

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 37, Roles: Total (22), Female (6), Male (16), Unassigned (0)

...In Brutopia Barker’s controversial portrait of the humanist Thomas More is shaped around his strained relationship with his daughter Cecilia, here discovered to be the author of a counter-text to her parent’s infamous Utopia. Cecilia’s wit...

Oberon Books, 2012

Oberon Modern Plays

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Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (16), Female (5), Male (10), Unassigned (1)

...In Christ's Dog the dying Lazar, arch-seducer and bigamist, treads out a journey he feels compelled to undertake to reach accommodation with his past. At every stage of his search, a different version of the untold story of Christ's dog...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 3, Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (14), Female (5), Male (9), Unassigned (0)

...The plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw, a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its terrible...

Oberon Books, 2018

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Scenes: 3, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...In Critique of Pure Feeling, an old woman, sceptical of love but not of property, finds herself recklessly participating in an erotic duel...

Oberon Books, 2020

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Scenes: 10, Roles: Total (18), Female (9), Male (9), Unassigned (0)

...In Dans Le Palais Je, Barker's nihilistic landowner at once establishes a different tone as she survives waves of social unrest and outbids the cruel with her own cruelty. In this chaos, she relies on the delivery of obscure but meaningful...

Oberon Books, 2004

Oberon Modern Plays

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Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...A young man rushes to reach the bedside of his dying father, but arrives too late. His younger brother was present at the death, but his attitude is strangely ambiguous, and the elder brother becomes suspicious. The intentions of the dead...

Oberon Books, 2020

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Roles: Total (3), Female (2), Male (0), Unassigned (1)

...In Deep Wives, a revolutionary movement called the Alterations puts a rich woman in the hands of her servants. The body, and its political meanings, is at the heart of this uncanny work, written for two actresses and a mechanical dog...

Oberon Books, 2018

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Scenes: 6, Roles: Total (3), Female (1), Male (2), Unassigned (0)

...In Distance he views the horrors of The Great War from an unusual perspective, that of the mother of a killed son, who arrives at her own philosophy of mourning...

Oberon Books, 2018

Oberon Modern Playwrights

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Scenes: 21, Roles: Total (7), Female (3), Male (4), Unassigned (0)

...In Exquisite, Barker's theme is the ethical ambiguity of slavery. In a dimly feudal setting, but constantly referring to our time, unsolved murders decimate a stable community. The protagonist, a loyal and uncritical serf, declines...

Oberon Books, 2008

Oberon Modern Plays

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Acts: 2, Scenes: 33, Roles: Total (9), Female (3), Male (6), Unassigned (0)

...Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground, a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his...

Methuen Drama, 2022

Modern Plays

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Acts: 4, Scenes: 12, Roles: Total (11), Female (4), Male (7), Unassigned (0)

...Four Dialogues which are small in size of cast, but ambitious in their confrontations with the ideas of faith, language, and longing. Struggling to define their needs, the characters come near to the final purpose of Barker's dramatic...