Henry VI, Shakespeare's primer in History

Shakespeare's Globe are currently offering audiences the relatively rare opportunity to see all of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays over one day, either at the Globe itself or on tour (including some Wars of the Roses battlefields). The plays add up to an extraordinary theatrical experience, being a kind of primer to History through Shakespeare's eyes. Shakespeare later returned to History in his Henry IV and Roman plays which are more sophisticated in terms of structure, language and character. Yet there is something raw and elemental about the Henry VI plays which makes me wish that they were better known and performed more often. A full day contemplating an Elizabethan contemplation of English History is a day well spent.

It is probable that what is now known as Henry VI Part 1 is the latest of the plays, first performed after the success of Parts 2 and 3. The play isn't really about the Wars of the Roses, being what we'd now term a prequel. The play's main focus is on the loss of France by the English nobility, as Henry V's victory at Agincourt is undone by an insurgency led by the French Dauphin and other nobles, assisted mightily by a woman whom we now know as Saint Joan of Arc but in Shakespeare's time was considered by the English as a witch and called Joan La Pucelle. The French are given a run for their money by the occupying English Army led by Lord Talbot. This French story is interspersed with scenes showing the beginning rumbles of York's rebellion, what was to become the Wars of the Roses back in England.

Talbot is the most striking character in Part 1. He is a kind of archetype of the loyal soldier, completely brilliant on the battlefield, absolutely sure-footed tactically but ultimately betrayed by his superiors in the English Army, whose squabbles lead to him being denied reinforcements in a key battle (Castillon) and the ensuing loss of his life (alongside his son, John). Shakespeare (and his collaborators) take some liberties with the actual history in this portrait but this allows them to create a rich and resonant character; Talbot is not very different from the contemporary British soldier in Iraq who loses his life because he was denied the proper equipment by slippery politicians who have their own concerns back home. Of course, Talbot does not question the war itself. In Talbot's brave, forlorn death we see (when the plays are performed in historical sequence) Shakespeare's History claiming its first victim. A man who lives by the sword dies by the sword, whatever the morality of the battle or sense of patriotic duty he is performing under, Talbot's reward is death. It is a death which involves the extinguishing of the life of another member of his family, whose demise makes Talbot's all the more personally painful. Howard Barker says ""...the experience of history is an experience of pain; the words are interchangeable" and the Henry VI plays are very much a pageant of pain.

The England-set scenes in Henry VI Part 1 snake around the French scenes, sowing seeds for the later civil war. The important thing here is that those seeds have been planted before the action happens, with the deposition of Richard II and the usurpation of the throne by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV); Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York discovers that he has a legitimate claim to the throne, albeit by such a tortuous lineage that the explanation of it brought floods of laughter from the Globe audience. More than one critic has linked these plays with Aeschylus' Oresteia and there is a strong sense in which they, like much of Greek tragedy, show the workings of fate and the payment for past sins, which might lay dormant but fester until they erupt. There is a warning here – don't let anybody think they've got away with anything, as Time working through History continually brings the past to knock on the present's doors. And, Shakespeare being as Biblical an author as he was Greek, we see the sins of the fathers visited on future generations.

There were some unfortunate cuts in the Globe's productions, understandable in practical terms but still losing some of the point of the play. An early scene (Part 1 Act 2, Scene 3) featuring the Countess of Auvergne attempting to trap Lord Talbot through means of sorcery and enchantment. In itself, it adds little to the onward motion of the narrative – but taken together with Joan's use of sorcery to battle the English and Margaret of Anjou (albeit unwittingly) enchanting the Earl of Suffolk towards the end, there is a strong sense that underneath the use of force is an attempt to use dark and irrational forces (be they devilish or simply of the body and beauty) to influence the game. It is as if Shakespeare is acknowledging that men, power and weapons are not all that there is. This theme continues throughout the trilogy, with the downfall of the Duchess of Gloucester in Part 2, the evolution of Margaret of Anjou into a veritable Deborah of the Lancastrian side throughout to the prolongation of the War of the Roses caused by Edward IV's marriage to Lady Grey in Part 3. Desire and seduction have their role to play in History but in the Henry VI plays, desire is always dragged tomb-wards by events.

The Globe programme makes much of the fact that the plays were not written as a sequence and their titles were not, initially, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3. Only Part 1 originally had that King's name in it's title (Harry the Sixth), ironically I presume given the play is largely about the loss of the lands the more popular Harry the fifth won. Henry VI barely appears in Part 1, and when he does he is a callow youth - yet his character is nicely set up: he prefers books and study to public life, even shrinking initially at the idea he has to marry someone. Some read the plays as a dire warning against the centre of power being weak and vacillating but Henry seems to me to be more an emblem of a sensitive human being caught in History's web; History is unsparing even of those who don't take up the sword, and sometimes a man's birth drags him onto History's field of horror. 

Part 1 is very much a play with a central story (the battles in France) with a sub-plot (the enmity between the Houses of Lancaster and York) snaking through it. Part 2 (originally The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster) is much more a play of two halves. In the first three Acts (The Globe wisely has Part 2's interval at the close of Act Three), we see mostly men of influence interacting in interiors. These are very much scenes set in the corridors of power and much of the action is through talk; yet violence is an ever-present subtext of the talk and the first half of the play ends with the bringing down of the King's Protector, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Alongside Talbot, Gloucester is about the only character in the plays who offers anything like a positive image of a statesman. Early in Part 2, Gloucester is tempted by his Lady Macbeth-lite wife to usurp the throne, he being the next in line for the Lancastrian claim after Henry VI. He refuses to countenance this and we see that he, like Talbot, is a man for whom duty is more important than personal ambition. It is telling that, in the three plays as a historical sequence, the first major characters on the English side to be brought down to death are Talbot and Gloucester, the only two political animals who have duty as a spur. Shakespeare's monster History devours those most likely to offer loyalty and stability first, in order to open up its chaotic mouth. Yet is Gloucester good? In a scene cut from the Globe production, he has a couple of con-artist paupers flogged soundly – the kind of Shakespearean scene which is likely to give a left-liberal audience qualms. Shakespeare doesn't here question have anyone question the rightness of such rough justice (as Lear does in his mad scenes) and so the scene stands as an emblem of good social justice which potentially undermines itself to some audiences. The political Shakespeare of the Henry VI plays is, as far as I can see, a social conservative who extols patriotic duty, the strong arm of the law, strong and non-vacillating government.

Once Gloucester is out of the way, the contest for the throne begins in earnest and things fall apart. The consequences of the alliances and disagreements and decisions in the corridors of power are seen in the blood spilled in the open air of public spaces. The second half of Part 2 is, in contrast to the first's interiors, almost all exterior scenes of riot and battle. First, York prompts Jack Cade's rebellion (an Elizabethan conspiracy theory, if there ever was one) and, that being put down, the first battle of the Wars of the Roses takes place. It is worth pausing over Cade's rebellion a moment. Shakespeare is clearly not in sympathy with the revolt. Cade the puppet of people more powerful and educated than himself; once he gets power over other human beings, he immediately begins arbitrary executions, show-trials and a cultural year zero policy. Although some of Cade's commands are greeted by an audience with glee ("let's kill all the lawyers"), this is a pretty dispiriting portrait of revolutionary energy; I doubt Shakespeare would have been surprised by the 20th Century's Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, nor stored up much hope in the recent "Arab Spring". Revolt and revolution is, through Shakespeare's eyes, the mania of the mob; Cade is a thuggish, murderous, vainglorious vanguard. Anyone with hopes of human progress brought about by violent means might bristle at this portrait of revolutionary energy but History offers more evidence for Shakespeare's vision than against it.

Part 2 ends with England in the grip of civil war. Part 3 (originally The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York) shows civil war as a horror show and conveyor belt of pain, each major stage figure passing towards their death. Atrocity pretty soon becomes the norm, as Margaret and Clifford for the Lancastrians summarily execute York's young son, the Earl of Rutland, during the Battle of Wakefield. The historical Rutland was 17 and older than Richard of Gloucester and George of Clarence when he died; Shakespeare makes him much younger. The killing is portrayed as a despicable act, on a par with Macbeth's murder of Macduff's children; what we would now consider a war crime. The slaughter of child Rutland sets a tone of darkness which pervades the first part of the play. In the midst of the darkness, the central scene of the first part has King Henry come centre stage and wish himself out of History, a mere "gentle swain" counting the days, months and years as he tends his sheep. Being in History is unforgiving and straight after his speech Henry is made to witness the mourning of a Son who has killed his father and a Father who has killed his son, a schematic pairing with little historical basis but which beautifully emblematizes the hellishness of the world being staged.

Just as Part 3 becomes almost unbearably painful in its impact, Shakespeare does what might be counted as the first genius coup de theatre in his career. We've already met the Duke of York's son, Richard of Gloucester, as a minor character in Part 2; intriguingly, the audience yelped with joy as soon as they saw his limping, twisted form come on stage. During Act 3 of Henry VI Part 3, Richard gives a long, Machiavellian speech outlining his future ambitions and determination to let nothing stand in the way of his own progress to the throne. There are a number of curious things about this speech. One is that it is absolutely not "set-up" in anything we previously see or hear of from Richard. He has been a loyal son of York, understandably sickened by his brother Rutland and father's killings. He is suddenly revealed as a psychopath and sociopath par excellence, a far more terrifying figure than anyone we have hitherto seen on the stage. The effect is almost as if we had seen a number of larvae wriggling in the murk of the Wars and now one suddenly bursts forth from its chrysalis as a Death's Head Hawk-Moth. Richard appears like a great eruption from History, just as the Beast bursts forth from the sea in the Book of Revelations. Richard is certainly a consequence of the chaos the civil war has caused – which is not to say that there is merely a cheap psychological point being made about a deformed and abused man who experienced the butchering of his father and brother and so becomes a monster (although that's certainly in there) but that the plays vision has it that such monsters in unstable times get the opportunity to burst forth, as night follows day.

The second intriguing thing is that the audience love Richard and his speech. Not only does Richard fulfil the needs of History, he embodies the need of the audience to have the horrors of history mediated in a way which can still be seen as entertainment. A play which continued as the first 3 Acts of Henry VI Part 3 does without Richard coming in and entertaining us would be unbearable for a popular audience. Shakespeare has to continue to the worst but, to do so, needs Richard's theatricality and showmanship to carry his audience with him (we should always remember that Shakespeare was a populist writer and he writes his plays with the crowd in mind, not a cognoscenti or school of aesthetes). Richard's speech is a perfect example of theatre doing its thing as a means of inducting an audience into areas it might not otherwise wish to go. It's no wonder that Shakespeare went on to write a play with Richard at its centre; management, audiences and his own canniness must have been begging him..

The Globe put Part 3's interval after Richard's speech and follow it with the scene where Margaret and Warwick both approach the French King Louis for support. This scene is played as farce, with Louis a camp and broad parody Frenchman. This feels right, as not only are the shifting tones of the play necessary for the attention of the audience but also History, although painful, is farcical from a certain point of view. Louis takes himself very seriously indeed and therefore we can laugh at him; Richard brings us in on the joke, and so we laugh with him.

The play runs apace to its end at the Globe after this, with Henry and Edward IV on and off the throne for each other as if on a jigsaw. The Globe cut a lot of this fluctuation in fortunes, which is again a shame, as the text has intriguing, Jarry-like elements of absurdity not emphasised when these cuts are made. Finally, the Yorkists win at Tewkesbury, killing Prince Edward of Wales in front of his Mother, Margaret of Anjou. Margaret is one of Shakespeare's greatest female characters, every bit as developed as Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra and with a longer emotional journey through the trilogy than any of them. The shy princess brought into the net of history by the Earl of Sussex has seen her husband deposed, her lover beheaded (she carries around his severed head for some of Henry VI Part 2), finally becoming the Lancastrian warrior that her husband could never be. It was she that rubbed York's nose in the blood of his child, Rutland and now she weeps to see her own child die, realising too late what humanity is and how much pain is involved in such atrocities. It is a tribute to Shakespeare's writing that, although we know Margaret's complaints are rich considering her previous antics, we still nevertheless empathise with her pain. Even better, Shakespeare lets us realise how ironic Margaret's complaints are without having another character point out this irony in on-the-nose dialogue (dramatists, learn from this).

Richard of Gloucester scoots from the Tewkesbury battlefield to murder Henry VI; the apotheosis of History meets out its revenge against the man who would escape it. Henry's killing is purely about ambition and ideology – Henry stands in the way of the Yorkist claim to the throne (and therefore Richard's aim at it) but his friends and supporters are all dead and he has zero capital with the English people. Richard's killing of Henry is the symbolic sacrifice of an innocent. In his dying breath, Henry cries "God forgive my sins, and pardon thee!" It is no coincidence that in the final scene (in lines I can't remember being in The Globe version), Richard explicitly draws comparison between himself and Judas. Shakespeare, working in a deeply Christian culture and tradition, shows History as culminating in the sacrifice of Christ.

There is of course a large dollop of Tudor ideology in the Henry VI plays. I won't say propaganda, as I don't think the Elizabethan playwrights were being consciously propagandistic, rather simply repeating the commonplace beliefs – ideologies – of their time. Henry, near the end of Part 3, lauds the young Henry Tudor (future Earl of Richmond, nemesis of Richard III and so Henry VII) and Henry VI's death as Christ suggests Henry VII's victory was a kind of Second Coming, which is problematic to say the least. Tudor England was nobody's idea of paradise and in later plays Shakespeare dramatises the problems. Despite this, there is a strong sense in which the Henry VI plays transcend the particular history they are writing about or indeed writing from and offer a vision of History itself, a terrifying vision which, if you factor in the problems of seeing the Tudors as bringing long-lasting stability, is akin to Joyce's "…nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

In the programme notes, The Globe go out of their way to emphasise that the plays were not written as and never meant to be performed as a cycle. Yet by happy serendipity and beyond all reasonable expectation, they work as perfectly well in cycle as the Oresteia or Der Ring des Nibelungen. They ought to be much more frequently performed – I'd like to see the National do the three plays as uncut as possible in the Olivier with a large cast and major actors in the major roles; one of the problems with the Globe's touring version is that, whilst it is very good indeed on its own terms, the battle and mob scenes are very sparse and the cast have to double so much that many major characters (Warwick suffers particularly) don't come across as individually as they might. The plays are, as I said at the outset, Shakespeare's primer in the problem that is History. Though one might disagree with the pessimism of the vision, World History since their writing has tended to reinforce it, as the likes of Henry VI, Talbot, Humphrey, the Richards (of York and Gloucester), Margaret, Joan La Pucelle and Jack Cade et al try to either make good in, escape from or manipulate History to their own ends and all end up drawn down into its flood, dragging whole peoples down with them.

Judith: A Parting From The Body

With respect to Field Marshal Paulus, who had done the "wrong" thing and surrendered to the Red Army at the close of the siege of Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler stated "What is life? Life is the Nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the Nation." (Hitler, 2007) The question of whether an individual owes allegiance to something beyond themselves – their country or class or family or peer or political group – is a central question in ethics. It is also at the centre of Howard Barker's play Judith: A Parting From The Body, which is currently getting a welcome revival at the Cock Theatre. Judith posits that there is another force pulling at the individual, a force which may wrench them away from their allegiance to ideological forces and compel them to rebel; that force is desire.

Barker's subject is the assassination of the Babylonian general Holofernes by the Israelite widow Judith in his tent just before a battle which would have seen the nation of Israel massacred or enslaved. This is an Apocryphal subject, told in the Book of Judith, yet one which has been at the centre of European art  and culture for centuries: Chaucer and Dante wrote of it, Caravaggio, Artemisia  and Cranach painted it; Vivaldi composed an opera on the subject. In Barker's short play, Judith (accompanied by a servant) arrives at the tent of the general planning to kill him, only to have her plans thrown into doubt by a mutual desire which develops between the widow and the general. What does a person do when one's ideological commitments are at odds with one's desiring subjectivity?

Barker does not change the tale's end. Judith beheads Holofernes and so saves Israel. But there it also appears that in betraying her personal bodily desires for the body politic in this way, Judith has killed herself. She is paralysed after the act and only rises as a new being, one who announces that "Israel Is My Body!" (Barker, 1990) She stomps around declaring herself a god and wishing to massacre innocents. She is a walking talking price that has been paid for committing oneself ideologically against all personal considerations.

Barker does not indicate whether he thinks she has done the right or wrong thing. It is made clear, as in the original, that Holofernes death was absolutely necessary for the survival of Israel. Yet who could think that the being Judith becomes is admirable? Perhaps the choice is impossible and, one way or another, the only choice is between deaths.

The strength of Judith as a theatre event is that it shows, in one intense act and through the interaction of just three characters, the impossibility of the human situation at this extreme. Given the infinite calls of ideological commitment that pull at us all and the many times when we are expected to act against our own desiring agency's interest, Judith offers a microcosmic vision of a terrible, insurmountable  moment in which we could all find (and lose) ourselves any time now.

Bibliography

Barker, H. (2011, 02 08). Judith: A Parting From The Body. (R. Winfield-Smith, Director, C. Cusack, E. Prior, & L. Smith, Performers) Cock Tavern Theatre, London, England, United Kingdom.

Barker, H. (1990). The Europeans / Judith. London: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.

Hitler, A. (quoted at) (2007, 05 18). General Paulus Nazi Germany. Retrieved 02 12, 2011, from Sparticus International : http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERpaulus.htm

Veronika Voss and fascination

Veronika Voss is the last film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BRD trilogy, following The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. All of the films are set in West German in the 1950s and each features a central female protagonist at the centre of a nexus of economics, history, survival and desire. Yet Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate film before his death in 1982 feels somewhat different to the other two BRD films. The titular protagonist does not find and make herself during the economic miracle - as do Maria and Lola - but has already spent the best part of herself during the war years. Voss is based on the last years of UFA star Sybille Schmitz, a hugely popular actress and favourite of Goebbels whose career never recovered once WW2 was over; she committed suicide in 1955. Using her life as a springboard, Fassbinder creates a glorious black and white noir in which a soccer journalist is drawn into a web by a faded actress, a web which leads to death and despair; it bears some similarities to Sunset Boulevard in the same way that Braun does Mildred Pierce or Lola does The Blue Angel.

The received wisdom about Fassbinder's BRD trilogy is that they are in some ways allegorical portraits of the West German economic miracle (Thomas Elsaesser deals with this critically in his excellent book Fassbinder's Germany: History Identity Subject). Voss feels different because, although it is grounded in a particular time and its lead character has been shaped by a particular historical period, the subject matter of the film leaps beyond history into something more dazzling and dangerous. Veronika Voss is a film about desire and fascination, subject matter which is far more compelling (to my current eyes) than allegorizing history for socio-critical purposes. Voss seems like the last station for Fassbinder before his extraordinary final film Querelle, whereby he jettisons Germany history and all pretence at social realism to give a deeper, wider-ranging vision into fascination, disavowal and the forming of the socially gendered self (see Steven Shaviro's chapter on Querelle in his The Cinematic Body).

The journalist in Veronika Voss becomes fascinated by VV after meeting her after a screening of one of her Nazi era films. He becomes embroiled in her life as she tries to make a comeback, tries to deal with the past and maintains her present morphine addiction. The journalist's girlfriend also gets involved with Voss, leading directly to the girlfriend's death. This fascination of the couple with Voss can be taken as an emblem of audience fascination with stars and celebrities. Whether it is Voss on the silver screen, Voss as public celebrity or Voss as lost cause, at all times the woman is completely compelling and the couple are driven, we and they are  never sure why, to involve themselves with her. From whence does Voss's fascination derive? Fassbinder answers this question partially in the film's mise-en-scene, where she is made available to us through a highly stylized use of black and white cinematography – a film star's appeal is provoked in us partially by their manufactured cinematic presence. Yet this only goes some way to explaining why a star becomes fascinating and continues to be fascinating even when they are no longer doing the things which made them a star. There seems to be a deep need within the central couple, it almost might be deemed a void, which Voss feeds and fills. Yet even as I type this, I am advised by a voice to clarify – Veronika Voss does not criticise the fascination that its protagonist holds; it wallows in it. To merely criticise would be a puritan's pose; Fassbinder was better than a puritan. There is a scene, near the end, where Voss stands at a piano and sings Memories Are Made of This; other characters watch her as the audience do, fascinated even as the performance falters, each experiencing it in a peculiar, personal way. Rosel Zech brings a quality of watchability to this moment which is extraordinary, convincingly conveying that this person is the only person who can perform the song in this way, that we are experiencing the presence of a daring singularity. The idea that an individual can be a singularity, perfectly unlike anything else, is dangerous to the Democratic ideal. This makes fascination a subject which an artist explores at his or her peril, especially in ages such as ours, in which art is supposed to have a socially valuable qualities. Fascination has little to no positive, progressive social value, yet it is difficult to imagine life being as intriguing without it.

Fascination is a quality we most associate with film, music and sports stars; politicians might also fascinate and this is where the subject causes most unease. Yet fascination is not solely the preserve of the (in)famous. How many people owe their relationships and their careers to the fascination they exert over others? Only this week, the Tory politician William Hague has been unable to quite explain why he gave one Christopher Myers a job as his Special Advisor; it could be that Myers fascinated him in the way that, for example, George Villiers the first Duke of Buckingham fascinated James I and his son, Charles I. There is not necessarily an active sexual component to fascination – having sex with the fascinator might be a part of the deal or not – but what is central is that fascination brings a kind of mystery into our lives, the kind of mystery the Saints felt when they pursued their God, even unto their annihilation. Fascination and annihilation go together, the one leading inexorably to the other – perhaps we are fascinated because we wish to lose ourselves, or because we believe that we are lost and wish to find ourselves; in either case, the fascinator is believed to be the one in which we can be lost or found.

To be a fascinating person is a lifelong occupation. Those who fascinate are as addicted to being fascinating  as those fascinated by them are addicted to the fascination. Fascinators often come to bad ends – Voss commits suicide, a death arranged by the morphine-dealing health "carers" who are picking over the last remnants of her wealth in the film; in the age of Kings, favourites like Gaveston, Hugh Despenser or Villiers were killed by political rivals. It is doubtful whether a fascinator can ever stop casting the spell of fascination; the best they can do is become a recluse, like Garbo. One might break the fascinator's spell on oneself, although my suspicion is that life would be then given a fine coating of grey (unless one found another fascinator).

Fassbinder's Veronika Voss is one of the few contemporary, "respectable" works which deal with fascination. It is a lucky coincidence that I watched it in the same week as I re-read Howard Barker's small book Death, the One and the Art of Theatre. Barker is one of the few contemporary theatre artist who takes fascination as a subject. Odd, given that fascination is all around us but then, fascination is, as I suggest, an invitation to death. I write this blog not as a definitive statement but rather as a declaration of interest in fascination as a field of meditation, as a subject area (I am researching the life of the above mentioned Villiers for a film script).  I inch forwards a case that we consider fascination…

The Artist as Monster Times Two

Twice in the space of seven days I've encountered dramas revolving around the idea of the artist as monster. As an artist, this is bound to be of interest to me (I hope I am not too much of a monster); I do wonder whether this is a subject which is that close to the concerns of many people, except that it does raise questions about the way that any self relates to others in order to get things done, and getting things done is the primary concern of Protestant Man. The artists – both poets - in both Elegy for Young Lovers (an opera by Hans Werner Henze with libretto by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, performed by ENO at the Young Vic) and Hurts Given and Received (a play by Howard Barker, performed by The Wrestling School at Riverside Studios) play merry hell with the lives of those they come into contact with, but the pieces have divergent attitudes towards this wreaking of havoc.


Elegy for Young Lovers concerns a middle-aged and highly respected poet named Mittenhofer, who spends months of each year at a hotel in the Austrian Alps in order to take inspiration from the ravings of a demented woman, Hilda Mack, who has been living in the hotel for forty years since the disappearance of her husband whilst he was climbing a local peak. Mittenhofer is waited on hand and foot by his patroness/private secretary the Countess Carolina and his personal physician, Dr Reischmann, fawners both. Mittenhofer has a young mistress, Elizabeth, and the crux of the story is that she falls in love with the doctor's son, Toni, much to Mittenhofer's chagrin. We witness Mittenhofer's infantile demands and ritualistically adhered to obsessive compulsive routine and soon get the idea that this is not a very pleasant human being to be around at all; yet Mittenhofer is worse than a pain – he is actively evil, as he compels the young lovers to gather him edelweiss on the mountainside and, when a blizzard hits, tells the local guide that there is no one from the hotel out in the storm; the lovers die. The drama ends with Mittenhofer reading his new poem – 'Elegy for Young Lovers' – to an appreciative audience in a packed Vienna hall, dedicating his new work to the lovers whose death he arranged.

Much is made in the programme of the possibility that Mittenhofer is based on W B Yeats, although others have suggested that Hugo von Hofmannsthal and even Benjamin Britten are possible originals for the character. This scrabbling around for originals doesn't really interest me; why the trio of Henze, Auden and Kallman should think that Mittenhofer's story is an important one to tell does. There is an oddness in these three homosexual artists telling this tale, as the lovers are presented as an "approved" heterosexual pairing (unlike the age-gap mistake which is the Mittenhofer/Elizabeth affair) and as they lie waiting for death on the mountain, they imagine the life they might have lived, which is a pretty ordinary example of normative petit-bourgeois living from the mid-20th century; Mittenhofer's great sin is that he prevented their living out this existence. I can't help suspecting that there's a certain self-laceration in the trio's choice of material here; all three of them being avowedly left-wing, this feels like a public performance of self-criticism, a rejection of their own potential to use and abuse "ordinary" folk by asserting their Great White Artist egos.

The setting of the tale is a very Nietzschean one, and there is a satire here against the idea of the Great Nietzschean/Romantic artist who uses those around him for the glorification of his Important Works. The joke appears to be that Mittenhofer is actually not a very good artist (the programme notes that Auden's real criticism of Yeats wasn't that he was a git but that his work wasn't any good in the later years). In some ways, the opera offers a rebuke to the idea of the individual genius who can get away with anything in pursuit of his self-aggrandizing artworks. In this, it seems to me to be an important work – a rejection on the part of three mid-twentieth century artists of the assumptions about artists which had by the time of their writing it become rather clichéd. I have some sympathy for this, as those writers I've known who have paraded themselves in Mittenhofer-like ways have had an element of the faux-artist about them, dressing themselves in some rags of an outdated Romantic idea and finally not really coming through with the art which such a performance might be the only excuse for. I have my suspicions about the very idea of the writer who waits listening for the extraordinary things that those around them come out with and then churns out writing which is little more than compendiums of overheard bits and bobs. In Elegy, when Hilda Mack finally is faced with the truth of her husband's death, her madness is cured and she comes to possess herself again; in her new-found clarity, she scolds Mittenhofer for stealing her visions for his own work and reckons that she should have got some credit and a cut of the royalties.

In a note for Hurts Given and Received, Barker writes

The sacred character of the individual in secular democracies obliterates any possibility the sacred might be located in any other sphere, and the consequence is a war of competing egos, thinly concealed beneath sentimental and threadbare platitudes of conscience and pity. These rags of faith and reason, strung together by some dimly-remembered concept of progress, flutter over a culture which seethes with cruelty and manipulation, rendered more odious by the cult of transparency, a transparency that elicits no shame. The poet has perhaps, the obligation to own up to his wilfulness, if only to assist others to own up to theirs…

Barker's protagonist, the poet Bach, also arranges the death and distress of his friends and helpers which in turn feeds his work. The work has a great effect on those that read it – its quality even encourages a policewoman to hide Bach's sex-murder of his nymphet mistress – but Bach is in turn punished and exploited by those that come after him, taking inspiration from his work whilst standing around as he is kind-of crucified. Barker is certainly approaching some difficult questions about individuals' and societies' relationship to those we consider Great Artists; he is a lot less satirical than the Elegy trio, but as piece of work, Hurts Given and Received seemed less successful than Elegy, which feels in Fiona Shaw's production like a major work.

Some of the blame for the Barker piece might be laid at the foot of the Gerrard Mcarthur's production, which is an impressive piece of staging but I was never convinced by either the relationships nor by the claims made in the text as to Bach being who the play claims he is. I am not sure whether Barker means us to agree with the character and his admirers that Bach is a genius, but I never for a moment believed that this was a man who was capable of creating anything. Tom Riley's performance in the central role is an impressive vocal and physical display of technique - at his best, as he lowered down from his high chair, he reminded me of Jeff Goldblum's Brundlefly spouting his insect-like brand of Nietzschean craziness; but Riley's (and other important performances in the production) are one-note affairs, him beginning as a show-off and brat and staying mostly in the same place. Barker is a difficult writer for actors to pitch right, but it can be done, as Hanna Berrigan's perfect gem of a production of a smaller Barker piece Slowly (which is playing alongside Hurts…) proves.

Yet there is something worth thinking about in Barker's characterization, and maybe a future production (or even future performances of this production) will make the play live on stage. The monstrousness of the artist – an overgrown and demanding child – is the monstrousness of the contemporary Western man, demanding and going through people (consuming them) in pursuit of some expression of the self. There is more to Hurts... than just this suggestion, but this strikes me as something which connects Barker's play with Henze's opera, the attempt to deal with the monstrousness of the self in the post-1945 world. At one point, a character compares Bach to "a war" with its "brief intoxications" when "men do vile things / men not themselves vile necessarily / its like a dream from which they wake saying / did I do that / was that me?" [Howard Barker, Hurts Given and Received/ Slowly (London: Oberon Books Ltd., 2010), p.70]

Both works encourage us to look at these monstrous artists and think about their behaviours; perhaps my qualm at the beginning - " whether this is a subject which is that close to the concerns of many people" – is unnecessary. I've always believed that we create our lives (but, to paraphrase Marx, "not in circumstances of [our] own choosing") and so we're all creative artists, all little Mittenhofers and Bachs…