These fifteen essays examine theatre through tragedy, sexuality, cruelty, politics, history, eroticism, performance and the sublime.

It specifically follows Barker’s sense of it as a theatrical condition in which certainty breaks down and spectators are left inside contradiction, rather than escorted safely out of it. The essays are especially strong on Barker’s interest in binaries, like those made between desire and annihilation, appearance and what cannot quite be represented, agency and submission, history and its theatrical reconstruction.

Contributors examine individual plays alongside Barker’s broader rejection of conventional British dramatic realism, showing how the more libidinal motives of people become ways of producing irresolution rather than delivering a thesis. It is criticism for anyone interested in radical theatre, tragedy after modernism or theatrical cruelty. 

Oberon Books, London, 2006. First edition. Paperback. Very light shelf and edge wear; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.