British playwright Howard Barker coined the term “theatre of catastrophe” to describe his unique brand of complex, ambiguous, and often unsettling drama. Revered in continental Europe, North America, and Australia as one of the greatest living dramatists working in the English language, Barker is also a celebrated poet, theater theorist, and painter. The first collection of interviews conducted with Barker, Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010 covers his entire career and gives a strong sense of the life and work of this innovative dramatist.

Mark Brown is a theater critic for the Sunday Heraldand lecturer in theaterstudies at the University of Strathclyde.

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Interviews
‘Energy—and the small discovery of dignity’
       With Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler (for Theatre Quarterly)
‘Articulate explorers in an age of populism’
       With Charles Lamb
‘The idea of hidden life’
       With David Ian Rabey
‘A laboratory of human possibility’
       With Charles Lamb
‘On puppetry and All He Fears’
       With Penny Francis
‘A demand for the problematic’
       With Dan Hefko
‘It has always been possible to improve on God’
       With Charles Lamb
‘Death as a theatrical experience’
       With Aleks Sierz
‘Crisis is the essential condition for art forms’
       With David Ian Rabey and Karoline Gritzner
‘Not what is, but what is possible’
       With Thierry Dubost
‘About things on the stage’
       With Elisabeth Angel-Perez et al
‘Ecstasy and the extremes of emotional life’
       With Mark Brown
‘A rupture to the moral curve’
       With Elizabeth Sakellaridou
‘On Shakespeare’
       With Vanasay Khamphommala
‘An education in living poetry, vivid and violent’
       With Nina Rapi
‘On The Wrestling School’
       With Duška Radosavljevic
‘Art is about going into the dark’
       With Mark Brown

Notes
Notes on Contributors
A Barker Reading List