The creation of art in Howard Barker's The Theatre of Catastrophe

Howard Barker, as a contemporary British dramatist and founder of The Wrestling School, has become an important but controversial figure in British theatre through his concept of the Theatre of Catastrophe and his distinctive, imaginative, non-didactic, and anti-realist plays in an experimental form. Barker differentiates between the theatre and the art of theatre and problematizes the issues of artistic imagination, aesthetic beauty, human creativity, and freedom of artistic expression in his plays whose main characters create art and rebel against their repressive societies. He puts an emphasis on the issues of death and creation of the tragic experience by reinventing tragedy as a contemporary form. The subject matters of his anti-cathartic and anti-mimetic tragedies are audacity, destruction, power relations, and human motivations. He is artistically interested in reappropriating plays of the past as his raw material by rejecting political, moral, and aesthetical concerns. The aim of this thesis is to examine how Barker's art of theatre is theorized and can be applied to Scenes from an Execution (1990) as a play highlighting artistic creation; (Uncle) Vanya (1991) as an adaptation being rewritten with a postmodernist approach and The Castle (1985) as a contemporary tragedy. These three plays portray how Barker's theory of theatre has shaped his plays as pieces of the art of theatre reflecting his vision of tragedy and postmodern theatre.