12 Facts About Howard Barker

Howard Barker was born on 28 June 1946 and is a British playwright, screenwriter and writer of radio drama, painter, poet, and essayist, writing predominantly on playwriting and the theatre.

Only through a tragic renaissance, Howard Barker argues, will beauty and poetry return to the stage.

In other plays, Howard Barker has fashioned responses to famous literary works.

For Howard Barker, Chekhov is a playwright of bad faith, a writer who encourages us to sentimentalize our own weaknesses and glamorize inertia.

Howard Barker's protagonists are conflicted, often perverse, and their motivations appear enigmatic.

Howard Barker's heroes are drawn into the heart of the paradoxical, fascinated by contradiction.

Howard Barker's characters seem to be at emotional extremes, to speak in the same overwrought, rhetorical language.

Howard Barker has acknowledged he has had greater success as playwright internationally than in his home country of Britain and many of his plays have been translated into other languages.

Howard Barker has noted that his plays have been more successful when performed abroad in America, Australia and Europe, especially mainland Europe where Barker has been celebrated as "one of the major writers of modern European theatre".

In Britain, Howard Barker formed The Wrestling School Company in 1988 to produce his own work in his native country.

Howard Barker has authored several volumes of poetry, an opera, the text for Flesh and Blood, a dramatic scene for two singers and orchestra by David Sawer, and three collections of writings on the theatre.

Howard Barker divorced in the 1980s and has lived on his own in Brighton since then.