UCC Drama and Theatre Studies
First Year Production

THE POSSIBILITIES by Howard Barker

Granary Theatre| Wed 12 - 14 March | 8pm | €7/€5

"In an era of authoritarian government the best theatre might learn a different function. Abandoning entertainment to the mechanical and electronic, it might engage with conscience at the deepest level. To achieve this it would learn to discard the subtle counter-authoritarianism that lurks behind all satire, and cease its unacknowledged collaboration with the ruling order by not reproducing its stereotypes. It would unburden itself of an increasingly irrelevant didacticism and evolve new relationships with its audience which were themselves essentially non-authoritarian. (p. 49)

…living in a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity , complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound strength. The play which makes demands of its audience, both of an emotional and interpretative nature, becomes a source of freedom, necessarily hard won. The play which refuses the message, the lecture, the conscience-ridden exposé, but which insists upon the inventive and imaginative at every point, creates new tensions in a blandly entertainment-led culture. (p. 48)
…
It is precisely in the hinge between the independence of moral will, claimed and performed, and the crushing imperatives of public order and its necessary pieties, that a drama of moral speculation discovers its resources, and fractures the repression of experience that characterizes a culture industry such as we enjoy, bent on extinguishing pain in a welter of comedy and the inflation of domestic routine into seamless narratives. If it is true, as Adorno suggested, that no great art is ever socially desired, its corollary must be that the desired is an art that contributes only to the restatement of the given. In a series of ten plays called "The Possibilities" that were performed for the first time at the Almeida Theatre in 1986, I attempted to write a set of short narratives that could not be claimed by the audience on the usual territory of moral accord.  (p.99)
…
In "The Possibilities" I recouped from a series of appalling situations a will to human dignity and complexity that came precisely from the absence of conventional politics. The unpredictability of the human soul, resistant to ideology and the tortures of logic, became a source of hope, even where death was inevitable." (p.49)

Barker, H. (1993), Arguments for a theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press

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