Two Against Nature: Rehearsing and Performing Howard Barker's Production of his Play The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo

Abstract

The English dramatist/director Howard Barker has, through a unique combination of style, content, theoretical argument and mise-en-scène, persistently countered conventional presumptions and propositions of the supposedly ‘natural’ diminutions or ‘inevitable’ restrictions whereby one might think, feel, speak, act, love and exist. His work offers a purposefully anti-naturalistic expansion of vocabulary: of language, terms of experience, scenic and physical expression, and being. This article presents an actor's account of preparing and playing a role, under Barker's direction, in a two-hander play, and offers a reading of the play's strategic dynamics based on these experiences, and of the characters' uses of self-conscious performances in order to sustain and subvert artifice, with references to Greenblatt's theories of theatrical charisma and eroticism, and Baudrillard's theories of seduction.