Blok/Eko
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Howard Barker’s theatre is characterized by its tragic scale and its distinctive way of exposing the unconscious resistances that underlie apparent social unanimity, both in the sexual and political spheres.
Barker’s play, BLOK/EKO, is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world. Eko, an ageing despot, seemingly on a whim liquidates the entire medical profession, asserting that consolation – in the form of song – is a better way with sickness than drugs or surgery. A connoisseur herself, she knows great song is itself the distillation of suffering and so deliberately exposes her greatest poet Tot to a life of crime, poverty and humiliation in order to extract from him his finest work.
BLOK/EKO is the first outcome of Barker’s residence as Creative Fellow at the University of Exeter (2010-2012) and the main element of his Plethora/Bare Sufficiency project.
Howard Barker
Howard Barker is an internationally renowned dramatist, whose first plays were performed at the Royal Court and by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since 1992 his work has been presented by his own company The Wrestling School. Barker's theatre is characterized by its poetic, non-naturalistic form and inhabits worlds of contradiction, suffering and sexual passion. Barker is also a poet and theorist of theatre, whose 'Theatre of Catastrophe' defines a new form of tragedy for our times.
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