Found in the Ground
From: Wednesday, 30th September 2009
To: Sunday, 11 October 2009
Our Review: 
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Synopsis
Urinating nurses, mechanical dogs, fornicating, headless women, burning books and Adolf Hitler are all part of the bold visceral landscape of Howard Barker’s startling new play. Found in the Ground is unique in his recent work: an exhilarating challenge to both language and design but threaded with a cruel black comedy and a host of characters whose human weaknesses, dreams and desires we all too readily recognise. A cast of 13 will create a continuously revolving kaleidoscope of bodies, sounds and gesture based around two strong images; a trio of barking guard dogs and a blazing bonfire. The dogs belong to a dying former Nuremberg judge turned senile delinquent. The bonfire was formerly his priceless antiquarian library. While he rejoices in this wilful act of desecration, his daughter creates a new vocation for herself intended to bring comfort to the terminally ill. The dogs are handled by a war criminal who along with five nurses serve the judge. As the play gradually exposes the judge's highly dubious history, his executed victims appear. His passionate longing to meet the arch criminal who evaded his prosecution, Adolf Hitler, is at last satisfied when Hitler arrives...
Our Review:
5 October 2009
“Intimacy is awesome”. Barker doesn’t use the word awesome in the American sense. Found In The Ground, his new play, made for his own production company, the Wrestling School, promises “urinating nurses, mechanical dogs, fornicating, headless women, burning books and Adolf Hitler”. It reads a bit like a press release for the Jim Rose Circus’s first show in Auschwitz and on one level the production does feel designed to shock at all costs. This can get tiresome. But the relentless barrage of nightmare images contains flashes of pithy, uncanny emotional honesty, which move this piece away from prurient Horrorcaust spectacular and towards a scream of consciousness at the terror of mortality and the terror of the responsibility of living. It is uncomfortable viewing precisely because the ideas it considers are big, painful and irresolvable.
A senile former Nuremberg judge is burning his priceless library and considering the...
Creative
Howard Barker (Author)
The Wrestling School (Company)
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