Bite of the Night … A Play by Howard Barker

Hugh Hodgart is what you might call a bit of a Scottish theatrical legend. Head of the School of Drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (formerly the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama).

For Hodgart, as a director and teacher, presenting student actors such as Colin Morgan with a Howard Barker play is rather like offering them a drama by Shakespeare: “Barker is a poet and a historian, and that’s expressed through his writing.  Barker’s theatre stands, says the director, against “the dead hand of Hollywood realism. Something has happened in the past 100 years that has made us fearful of drama which is poetic, ambiguous and metaphorical”.

I am copying here the entire First Prologue of Bite of the Night as an example of Hugh Barker’s poetry.  The play was directed by Professor Hugh Hodgart.

First Prologue

They brought a woman from the street  And made her sit in the stalls
By threats  By bribes  By flattery
Obliging her to share a little of her life with actors

But I don’t understand art.  Sit still, they said

But I don’t want to see sad things.  Sit still, they said

And she listened to everything   Understanding some things  But not others
Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust  Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again, said

If that’s art I think it is hard work.  It was beyond me.  So much beyond my actual life

But something troubled her   Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said

And again, she listened to everything
This time understanding different things
This time untroubled that some things
Could not be understood
Laughing rarely  but now without shame
Sometimes suffering disgust  Sometimes thoroughly amazed
And in the light again said

This is art, it is hard work.  And one friend said, too hard for me
And the other said,  if you will, I will come again
Because I found it hard.  I felt honoured

— Howard Barker,
from The Bite of the Night

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