1. Introduction: The ultimate matter of style - David Ian Rabey 2. Performance within performance: Howard Barker and the acted life - some thoughts - Melanie Jessop 3. Unearthly powers of invention: speech, report and repetition in recent Wrestling School productions - James Reynolds 4. Reinventing 'grand narratives': Barker's challenge to postmodernism - Elisabeth Angel-Perez 5. Institutions, icons and the body in Barker's plays, 1977-86 - Ian Cooper 6. Access to the body: the theatre of revelation in Beckett, Foreman, and Barker - George Hunka 7. 'Not nude but naked': nakedness and nudity in Barker's drama - Eléonore Obis 8. Places of punishment: surveillance, reason and desire in the plays of Howard Barker - Michael Mangan 9. Barker, criticism and the philosophy of 'The art of theatre' - Mark Brown 10. Staging Barker in France 2009 - Christine Kiehl 11. 21 for 21: A breakthrough moment in terms of the global theatre-making community's collaborative capacity? - Sarah Goldingay 12. I saw myself: artist and critic meet in the mirror - Mary Karen Dahl 13. 'His niece or his sister': genealogical uncertainties and literary filiation in Barker's Gertrude - The Cry - Vanasay Khamphommala 14. History in the age of fracture: catastrophic time in Barker's The Bite of the Night - Jay Gipson-King 15. The dying of today and the meta-stases of language: from history to tale to play to mise-en-scène - Elizabeth Sakellaridou 16. 'The substrata of experience': Barker's poetry, 1988-2008 - David Ian Rabey 17. Reading Howard Barker's pictorial art - Charles Lamb 18. Howard Barker's paintings, poems and plays: 'in the deed itself', or the triple excavation of the unchangeable - Michel Morel 19. Memories of paintings in Howard Barker's theatre - Heiner Zimmermann 20. The sunless garden of the unconsoled: some destinations beyond catastrophe - Howard Barker 21. Howard Barker and David Ian Rabey in conversation, New York 2010 Appendix: Howard Barker: chronology and bibliography Index