Wrestling with Catastrophe

For more than fifty years, Howard Barker has been one of Britain’s most influential and uncompromising contemporary dramatists. To mark his eightieth birthday, Flinders Drama Centre honours Barker’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary theatre with Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble production celebrating a writer whose provocative, poetic plays have challenged, divided and inspired generations of theatre-makers while remaining unlike anything else on the modern stage.

Directed by one of Howard Barker’s closest artistic collaborators, Gerrard McArthur, Wrestling with Catastrophe has been created by the graduating Honours actors of Flinders Drama Centre and brought to life by performers, directors, designers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre. Together they have crafted an original theatrical journey through scenes drawn from across Barker’s remarkable body of dramatic work.

Violent, beautiful, darkly funny and intellectually exhilarating, Barker’s dramas refuse easy answers. Love becomes political. Beauty becomes dangerous. History is shaped as much by private desire as by public power. Rather than offering certainty, Barker’s theatre invites audiences to embrace contradiction, complexity and imagination.

The production also celebrates Adelaide’s distinctive engagement with Barker’s work, from the Australian premiere of No End of Blame in 1981 to Brink Productions’ (a company founded by Drama Centre graduates) acclaimed exploration of his plays throughout the 1990s. In continuing this tradition, Wrestling with Catastrophe offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the exhilarating, uncompromising theatre of one of Britain’s most original dramatic voices.

Performances 29 July – 1 August @ 7:30pm and 31 July @ 2pm