Howard Barker’s ‘monstrous assaults’: eroticism, death and the antique text

Howard Barker is a writer who has made several notable excursions into what he calls ‘the charnel house…of European drama.’ David Ian Rabey has observed that a compelling property of these classical works lies in what he calls ‘the incompleteness of [their] prescriptions’, and Barker’s Women Beware Women (1986), Seven Lears (1990) and Gertrude: The Cry (2002), are in turn based around the gaps and interstices found in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c1627), Shakespeare’s King Lear (c1604) and Hamlet (c1601) respectively. This extends from representing the missing queen from King Lear, who Barker observes, ‘is barely quoted even in the depths of rage or pity’, to his new ending for Middleton’s Jacobean tragedy and the erotic revivification of Hamlet’s mother. This paper will argue that each modern reappropriation accentuates a hidden but powerful feature in these Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – namely their clash between obsessive desire, sexual transgression and death against the imposed restitution of a prescribed morality. This contradiction acts as the basis for Barker’s own explorations of eroticism, death and tragedy. The paper will also discuss Barker’s project for these ‘antique texts’, one that goes beyond what he derisively calls ‘relevance’, but attempts instead to recover ‘smothered genius’, whereby the transgressive is ‘concealed within structures that lend an artificial elegance.’ Together with Barker’s own rediscovery of tragedy, the paper will assert that these rewritings of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama expose their hidden, yet unsettling and provocative ideologies concerning the relationship between political corruption / justice through the power of sexuality (notably through the allure and danger of the mature woman), and an erotics of death that produces tragedy for the contemporary age

The quest for extreme water repellency: Superhydrophobicity made easy

In his seminal work On Floating Bodies I Archimedes of Syracuse provided an explanation of the action of solid bodies on water. Although his thesis immediately benefitted King Heiro II² and has continued to serve mankind well, it ignores the effect of the interfacial interactions between the solid, water and air (surface tension). These interactions are negligible, or at least are considered negligible, compared to forces arising from the effect of gravity on large bodies. However, as the mass of the body decreases, the surface interactions become increasingly important leading to some unusual and potentially useful phenomena. The understanding and application of these effects is currently driving much fundamental research by physicists, chemical engineers, material scientists, and chemists into surfaces that display extreme properties, in particular extreme water repellency, or superhydrophobicitv. It is only comparatively recently that detailed mathematical expressions for the interaction between a liquid, solid and gas at these extremes have been developed, making progress that parallels that for the fabrication of these surfaces

On the importance of π–π stacking and cation–anion interactions in the construction of non-centrosymmetric networks of bromide salts of imidazolium cations bearing arene and polyfluoroarene rings

The salt 1-(2,3,5,6-tetrafluoropyridyl)-3-benzylimidazolium bromide crystallizes in the non-centrosymmetric space group Pna2₁. The structure arises from π–π stacking between the benzyl and tetrafluoropyridyl groups of the cations and cation–bromide interactions. It is the latter that gives rise to the non-centrosymmetry

Edward Bond & the celebrity of exile

A shibboleth has grown up around the work of Edward Bond. The tag ‘controversial dramatist’ has continued to dog both the man and his work. This article will hope to explore some of the contradictory, and sometimes frustrating manifestations that such ‘celebrity’ has produced. Since the reception of The War Plays [1985] by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theatre Bond has largely withdrawn his work from mainstream British theatre. Since the late 1990s he has looked to a new home – La Colline Theatre – in France, to premiere new work and run retrospective seasons of older plays. Here, Bond's celebrity is of a different kind, and has allowed him to enhance and develop his work as a playwright, director and writer about theatre. While this article draws on secondary sources it also uses material based on personal correspondence with Edward Bond

'Just a Word on a Page & there is the Drama': Sarah Kane’s theatrical legacy

This article questions about the modalities of war representation throughout puppets or objects in the contemporary theatrical creation, starting from a corpus of several European shows: Kamp and The Big War” by the Netherlands Company Modern Hotel, which evoke respectively the extermination Nazi camps and the first Word war; Zanjas of the French company Zapoï and the older founder of the Georgian Rezo Gabriatze: The Stalingrado Battle. The focus is particular: rather than analyzing the scenic representation of violence, it is a reflection on the notion of “animation”, which belongs to the theater of puppets, to show the specific procedures of the puppets figures in this creations, making of the war the place for a dialectic between the “discouraged” humanity and the persistence of a “soul” in the same life of the objects and the matter.El cuerpo en el territorio artístico ha sido utilizado no solo como medio de expresión de emociones sino también como el elemento central del discurso artístico. En las teatralidades contemporáneas este discurso se hace latente; el artista del mundo contemporáneo indaga e investiga, interrogándose en profundidad sobre la función de un cuerpo en escena, que no cumple solo con la función de transmitir un texto al espectador, sino que resemantiza la obra convirtiéndose en un elemento más de la puesta en escena. Teniendo en cuenta esta premisa centro el presente artículo en la obra de la dramaturga inglesa Sarah Kane, porque en ella el cuerpo es el responsable de resemantizar y materializar las convulsiones del amor contemporáneo    O corpo no território artístico foi usado, não só como um meio de expressão de emoções, mas também como o elemento central do discurso artístico. No exibicionismo contemporâneo esse discurso torna-se latente; o artista do mundo contemporâneo inquire e faz pesquisa, questionando em profundidade a função de um corpo na cena, que não só cumpre a função de transmitir o texto ao espectador mas também ressemantiza o trabalho se tornando outro elemento da encenação. Dada esta premissa o foco da minha apresentação será o trabalho da dramaturga Inglesa Sarah Kane, porque em seus textos o corpo é o responsável de ressemantizar e materializar as convulsões do amor contemporâneo

'Out Vile Jelly': Sarah Kane's 'Blasted' & Shakespeare's 'King Lear'

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bon