Howard Barker is the great anatomist of the British theatre. He does not dissect the state of the nation but the state of our heart and souls. Often it hurts. The company dedicated to staging his work is not called The Wrestling School for nothing. His latest play, his first full-length new play to be staged in Britain for three years, is as knotty as anything he has written.
The guts of it are this: Doja, an anatomist whose reputation for embalming dead monarchs is second to none, is summoned by an obscure kingdom where the king is on his death bed. But no sooner has Doja put the first incision into the body than he is besieged by the queen, the young prince and others in the kingdom who all want to seduce him. He senses that he is in extreme danger but is powerless to escape and avoid his doom. He is forced to collude in his own assassination.
The play takes the form of an intricate intellectual thriller that only unravels for the audience as the net tightens around Doja. Like many of Barker's plays, He Stumbled is about the slippery relationship between truth and lies and our taste for deception. Even the thriller-like form of the play plays on and panders to the audience' s love of a secret, the thought that we might be discovering something unknown, even unknowable. With its corrugated iron set in which shutters snap open and close, we are like voyeurs at a pornographic peepshow.
But there is so much more here too: a debate about superstition and rationality, the morbidity of our desires, the sweet rotting smell of our evasions and lies and the desolation of intimacy. This is classic Barker territory and he approaches it here with customary wit and poetic intensity.
The acting is crystal, almost frighteningly so. You have to be prepared to work damn hard for the rewards, but ultimately He Stumbled delivers, laying bare the secrets beneath its cool skeletal exterior.
Ends Saturday. Box office: 0151-709 4776. Then touring to the Lowry, Salford, Warwick Arts Centre and Riverside Studios, London.
