Studies in Theatre and Performance volume 32, number 3, is an issue dedicated to the work of director-dramatist Howard Barker, the Honorary Professor of Aberystwyth University Theatre, Film and Television Studies's department
The issue features contributions by three members of the university: David Ian Rabey, Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, Karoline Gritzner, Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies, and Alex Mangold, tutor in Modern Languages.
Rabey's article, 'Chasing the Ellipses: Staging Howard Barker's The Forty', centres on the directing of his 2011 departmental production, the first performances of a Barker text comprising forty short plays, undertaken by final year undergraduates. Rabey includes exclusive interview material with Barker from a dialogue undertaken after a public performance of the production, and correspondence with the author, which anticipates how this production, in an academic context, might inform future professional practice.
The article also includes colour photographs of the production, taken by Keith Morris, and includes substantial quotations from students, reflecting analytically on their practice, as part of their written components of assessment for the Advanced Production Project module, reproduced with their permission.
Gritzner's essay, 'Poetry and Intensification in Howard Barker's Theatre of Plethora', considers further the trans-personal effects of the poetic theatrical gesture in Barker's work; and Mangold's contribution, 'Reading Barker with Lacan: Twenty asides on Woman, the One and the Real', provides an hommage to the aphoristic style of Barker's own distinctively philosophical and theoretical reflections on practice to identify and interrogate aspects of Barker's experiments in tragedy, particularly its concerns with death and sexuality. |
