The Art of Seduction

 

Actors are the best seducers because acting is seducing. 

The theatre has to be able to make you beileve what you know is artifical true.  With the charm, grace and beauty the stage becomes a place of possibilities and reserrects dorment fantasies trasforming them into dramatical uncertain pleasures.  Howard Barker is one of the most explicit and brutal playwrights of darkened unrealities.  In his theatre unspeakable acts of sex and violence find a voice.  His particular intrest, better put as obsession, is the ways seduction and desire can lead to destruction and revitalisation.      

Barker treats desire as an unstabling, enhancing and destroying occurence.  Desire is a powerfully mysterous force that can undermine the rational social order.  For Barker desire is the pressure that pushes people into new unlived areas of their lives that explores their limitations and possibilities.  These passionate journeys, led by a curiosity to discover what hides beyond what is known, also involve the experience of pain, violation as well as the recognition of beauty.  They can become changed, unhinged, from their old identities and routines by letting desire transform them; or even destroy them. Uncertainty abounds when desire is encountered.  While the characters have their erotic allure the landscape that is created is essentially one of anxiety.  Anixiety of desire and of the destruction it can cause. In this sense desire is also similar to death as they are both secrects.  They are both unknown and are therefore uncertain principles that produces anixiety and curiosity. 

A perfect image of this clash of known order and strange desire is contained in The Castle.  An arab arcuitech has been aroused by the women around him and he shows his superior his twenty-seven versions of drawings of viginas, like the blueprints of a new building.  He is trying to find an answer to the question he asks in the previous scene:

“Where’s cunt’s geometry?  The thing has got no angles!  And no measure, neigther width nor depth, how can you trust what has no measurements?” 

How the characters do manage and manouveure their trust in desire or the desired one is their prodominent deilemma.  To act on desire is to risk your security, even sanity, on an gamble of a wish.  The descision might start looking appetising if you find  life feels unlived. 

Equally Barker’s theatre wishes to produce these feelings in his own auidence challenging them to interrogate their cetainties as an individual.  He hides fascinating secrects, unresolved images and cryptic lines all put to use for the pleasure of the crowd.  He wants the witnessing individuals not to understand but to be put into hypnotised state to something close to an obsessive gaze. A seduction.   

His theatre is not an entertainment but a temptation of possibilites.  Risk, violence, crisis, collapse, ruin; is all possible; with the hope that catastrophe is also a birth.