5 - Appropriating middle-class comedy: Howard Barker's Stripwell (1975)

Summary

A lot of my work is quite clearly pessimistic and I think the reason for that is that it is very difficult to be an optimistic socialist in England.

Where Howard Barker is concerned it is arguably more perverse than with any of the other writers considered in this volume to focus on one of his earliest pieces, which is cast in the form of a realistic comedy. While all playwrights of any significance develop, mature and reassess in the course of their careers, Barker has been engaged in a constant process of reinvention. This may well be one of the major reasons why interest in his work remains high in academic circles, while theatre journalists and the wider theatre-going public have frequently approached his later work with dismissive incomprehension. Indeed, one of the major motives for Barker to have established his own company to perform his works, the Wrestling School, was to ensure that he can maintain some control over the way in which his writing is translated to the stage, a process which requires an understanding and familiarity with his methods.

The early Barker play, Stripwell, is a particularly problematic choice for discussion, since Barker freely admits that this was a piece he ‘planned coldly to be a commercially successful play for a particular management’, and significantly it does not even appear in the list of twenty-five works by Barker which prefaces his Arguments for a Theatre (1989).