The Politics of Catastrophe: Confrontation or Confirmation in Howard Barker's Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Howard Barker's prolific writing career dates back to 1969 when his first radio play, One Afternoon on the 63rd Level of the North Face of the Pyramid of Cheops the Great, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4. Over forty of his stage plays have since been published and produced, and his theoretical manifesto Arguments for a Theatre is now in its third edition. The touring company the Wrestling School was formed in 1988 exclusively to produce Barker's work; in 1994 Barker himself directed Hated Nightfall for the company, and he has continued to direct many of his subsequent texts for them. The unique support Barker has received from John Calder publications and the Wrestling School, discussed in detail by Robert Shaughnessy in "Howard Barker, the Wrestling School, and the Cult of the Author," has afforded Barker's own theoretical and practical interpretations of his theatre a privileged dissemination. Consequently there is a danger that the objectives of his self-defined "Theatre of Catastrophe" and their underlying premises may be accepted without critique as a starting point for any analysis of his work. Thus it is Barker's own starting point that this article will examine, throwing into question the basic assumptions on which his theories rest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".