‘And Death Shall Have Dominion’: Failure of Theatre of Catastrophe in Howard Barker’s Brutopia (1989)

Describing an alternative history through a historiographic metadrama, Howard Barker’s Brutopia (1989) offers a bleak and unrelenting view of human nature. Through its portrayal of a society ruled by a group of brutal and sadistic elites, the play indicates that humanity’s darkest impulses are always lurking beneath the surface, imminent to be unleashed. While several critics argue that this view of human nature is overly pessimistic and even nihilistic, Barker aims to objectify what he methodologically introduces as the Theatre of Catastrophe, whereby he deconstructs the principles of Aristotelean tragedy and reconstructs an alternative theatre as an opposition. In doing so, he reworks Brechtian epic theatre by integrating its characteristics into his Theatre of Catastrophe with a prevailing poststructuralist approach that attacks absolution, functionality, and logocentrism. To this end, Barker takes death as his central theme and dwells on its various representations and meanings as he explains in his theoretically explanatory work Death, The One and the Art of Theatre (2005). However, this study argues that while Brutopia features elements of epic theatre, it simultaneously reinvents and redefines several dimensions of ‘functional deaths’, which makes the Theatre of Catastrophe paradoxical as its essential aim is to manifest a functionless and meaningless performance. According to Barker’s conception, death does not only appear by its meaning in the corporeal world in the play, but it is also manifested in several theoretical, historical, and political dimensions. As a methodology, the study explores death as a theme and also a method in the textual construction of the play, reading Brutopia as the theatrical manifestation and paradoxical failure of Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe. To illuminate this assertion, the study discusses the function of death to approach Barker’s redefinition of the notion as the primary life source of creativity, imagination, and his theory.