Howard Barker has never been reluctant to make a virtue of
contradiction. His plays, sown with jagged images that expose hypocrisy in
politics, religion, sex, or even medicine, combine a yearning for absolute
truth with a tragic sense of its impossibility. Frequently, his plays have
provoked bitterness, outrage or simple mystification. In this volume we
publish for the first time `Heaven', a play commissioned by the BBC.
Perhaps the irreligious and `improper' account of the activities of a
homosexual double agent and his establishment colleagues has too many
direct parallels for comfort. Yet the play remains a hilarious debunking of
the backwardness of the English village tribe and the self-protective
terror of those who govern in the public eye.

`The Hang of the Goal', one of Barker's most successful plays, first
performed at the RCS's Warehouse Theatre in 1978, is a study in guilt and
collusion. With its topicality undiminished, it takes the lid off one of
the most enclosed institutions in this or any society - the prison. When a
fire demolishes the Governor's pride, subsequent investigation turns up
more shame than the authorities deem acceptable. A cover-up is required,
and George Jardine, the most unconventional of civil servants, near
retirement and hungry for a knighthood, is recruited for the task.

Howard Barker shows remarkable candour, not only in his subject matter but
in his rich and iconoclastic use of the language; this original and poetic
manipulation of speech and metaphor has created a vivid theatrical medium
for which he is justly celebrated. His theatre is ruthlessly inventive and
makes few concessions, but as he himself has written, `Nothing in my plays
is incredible. It is the world which is incredible.'

Review

`There is no such thing as a minor Howard Barker play. He packs
more into the slenderest dramas than most playwrights manage in an epic.'
-- Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

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