Playwright behaving badly ... Howard Barker. Photograph: Eduardo Houth
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"Challenging" is usually only a pejorative term when applied to disruptive children. With theatre it's almost always high praise, second only perhaps to "groundbreaking" and "tour de force".
Yet when British critics talk about the work of Howard Barker - whose complex, violent and morally ambiguous plays are about as challenging as art gets without pulling weapons on the audience - they often sound like they're talking about English drama's equivalent of an Asbo kid. In the Telegraph a few years back, Charles Spencer lamented the fact that a promising young playwright had "fallen under the malign influence of Howard Barker". Our own Michael Billington has described him as a "frustrating dramatist". If only he'd behave.
The picture is generally rather different outside Britain, where his plays get much more lavish productions, and for anybody with an appetite for theatre which seeks to do more than deliver a message, his work is always worth seeing.
His latest production, The Seduction of Almighty God, reaches the Riverside Studios in west London this week, and to mark the occasion Barker - who turns out to be a very gracious and eloquent kind of delinquent - spoke to me about the new play, the unsettling nature of desire, the power of unworldly religion and his own gift for winding up the critics.
The Seduction of Almighty God by the Boy Priest Loftus in the Abbey of Calcetto, 1539 is published by Oberon Modern Plays, priced £8.99.
