Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010

British playwright Howard Barker coined the term “theatre of catastrophe” to describe his unique brand of complex, poetic, ambiguous, and often unsettling drama. Revered by many – not least in continental Europe, North America and Australia – as one of the greatest living dramatists in the English language, Barker is also a celebrated poet, theater theorist and painter. The first collection of interviews conducted with Barker throughout his illustrious career, Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, gives a strong sense of the life and work of this innovative dramatist.

‘These engrossing dialogues have a chiselled philosophical brilliance, and display a fierce personal dignity. In them we find Barker rejoicing in contrariety and championing the intimacies of beauty and suffering. As writer and director, he is, as he once admiringly said of actors, different in kind – a fact these fascinating interviews triumphantly confirm.’

Ian McDiarmid, actor