Editing Howard Barker (section)

==Themes==
Barker frequently turns to historical events for inspiration. His play ''[[Scenes from an Execution]]'', for example, centers on the aftermath of the [[Battle of Lepanto (1571)]] and a fictional female artist commissioned to create a commemorative painting of the [[Venice|Venetian]] victory over the [[Ottoman Empire|Ottoman]] fleet. ''Scenes from an Execution'', originally written for [[BBC Radio 3]] and starring [[Glenda Jackson]] in 1984, was later adapted for the stage. The short play ''Judith'' revolves around the Biblical story of [[Book of Judith|Judith]], the legendary heroine who [[decapitate]]d the invading general [[Holofernes]].

In other plays, Barker has fashioned responses to famous literary works. ''Brutopia'' is a challenge to [[Thomas More]]'s ''[[Utopia (More book)|Utopia]]''. ''Minna'' is a sardonic work inspired by [[Gotthold Ephraim Lessing]]'s [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] comedy ''Minna von Barnhelm''. In ''Uncle Vanya'', he poses an alternative vision to [[Anton Chekhov]]'s [[Uncle Vanya|drama of the same name]]. For Barker, Chekhov is a playwright of [[bad faith]], a writer who encourages us to sentimentalize our own weaknesses and glamorize inertia. Beneath Chekhov's celebrated compassion, Barker argues, lies contempt. In his play, Barker has Chekhov walk into Vanya's world and express his disdain for him. "Vanya, I have such a withering knowledge of your soul," says the Russian playwright. "Its pitiful dimensions. It is smaller than an aspirin that fizzles in a glass. . ."<ref>{{cite book |last=Barker |first=Howard |title=Collected Plays Vol. 2: Includes Love of a Good Man, the Possibilities, Brutopia, Rome, Uncle Vanya, and Ten Dilemmas |publisher=Calder |location=London |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-7145-4182-2}}</ref> However, Chekhov dies, and Vanya finds the resoluteness to stride out of the confines of his creator's world.

Barker's [[protagonist]]s are conflicted, often perverse, and their motivations appear enigmatic. In ''A Hard Heart'', Riddler, described by the playwright as "A Woman of Originality",<ref>{{cite book |last=Barker |first=Howard |title=A Hard Heart; The Early Hours of a Reviled Man |publisher=Riverrun Press |location=London |year=1992 |isbn=978-0-7145-4228-7}}</ref> is called upon to use her considerable brilliance in fortifications and tactics to save her besieged city. Each choice she makes appears to render the city more vulnerable to attack, but that outcome seems to exhilarate rather than upset her. "My mind was engine-like in its perfection," she exults in the midst of destruction.{{Citation needed|date=October 2015}} Barker's heroes are drawn into the heart of the [[paradox]]ical, fascinated by contradiction.

The 1995 edition of the encyclopaedic ''The Cambridge Guide to Theatre'' describes Barker as a playwright "adept at choosing telling dramatic situations in which many different incidents can take place, but he reverses what might be regarded as the moral expectations [as well as] the expected moral order of capitalist societies. […] Barker deliberately attempts to upset expectations, denying the value of reason, continuity and naturalism, but there is a certain predictability about his wildness. His characters seem to be at emotional extremes, to speak in the same overwrought, rhetorical language."<ref name=CambridgeGuide>{{cite book |last=Banham |first=Martin |title=The Cambridge Guide to Theatre |date=2000 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=United Kingdom |isbn=0-521-43437-8 |page=78 |edition=Corrected |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8qMTPAPFGXUC&dq=cambridge%20guide%20to%20theatre&pg=PA78 |access-date=15 February 2021}}</ref>