Victory - Choices in Reaction

Synopsis

Written in 1983 when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and set in 1660, when England's brief experiment with Republicanism ended with the restoration of the monarchy. A raucous treat for the senses - Barker's brutal, poetic, and gruesome Restoration tale of kings’ whores, bankers’ gold, and a widow’s quest to salvage a life from the debris and chaos of England at War. Oh. And her husband's body parts... As she is forced to react in a world of shifting loyalty, trust, power, and money, she discovers that the court of Charles II is as dirty and dangerous as any battlefield.

Our Review:

9 March 2009

The prolific Howard Barker has been challenging audiences with his self-styled ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’ for over 30 years. More appreciated on the Continent than in the UK (there’s currently a Barker festival taking place at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris), his highly wrought and murkily ambivalent dissections of power, violence and sexuality can be tough going but linger long in the mind. Having premiered his most recent play The Dying of Today last year, the Arcola now co-produces with Iceni a revival of one of Barker’s best and most accessible plays, the ironically titled Victory.

First staged in 1983, Barker (as so often) uses a historical period to comment on contemporary society, in this case suggesting the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 parallels Thatcherite Britain in its moral corruption and disregard for human dignity.

The macabre story follows the perilous journey taken by Bradsh...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

rds - 14 March 2009:

It must have seemed so controversial back in the early 80's when it was first performed. The setting is the Restoration, the dialogue a mix of period and modern with the result, in this writer's hands, a mess. Sledge hammer politics combined with puerile humour gives it the makings of a grotesque pantomime - Matthew Kelly looking and sounding like a decidedly foul mouthed Captain Hook desperately trying to avoid the fucking crocodile. And poor ol' King Charles, the II that is, the Merry Monarch turned into a petulant imbecile. OK, so the program notes say that some of the characters are "familiar, but it is not meant to be an accurate depiction of the times". That's for sure. Mr Barker is said to be appreciated more abroad than at home, that is quite understandable. The French for example love all that slap stick nonsense. Even though we gave the world the Goons and Monty Python we are still not comfortable when similar techniques are employed with plays with more serious pretensions, unless the writer happens to be Harold Pinter. I had no problem with the liberal use of the word cunt, which seemed to raise quite a few titters from the audience last night? But so what, it just became tedious and seemed to be used to make up for inadequacies in the script. A big omission in the program notes was the fact that Cromwell had closed all the theatres when he came to power - Charles, on the other hand, reopened them with the Restoration - the Merry Monarch indeed. Now I'm not too up on Charles' record in Ireland, but I certainly know Cromwell had a lot to answer for, his legacy can still be felt in that troubled island to this very day. Howard Barker has stretched his germ of an idea, linking Charles' restoration with Mrs Thatcher coming to power three hundred years later, so far that it's snapped and what is left is a grotesque and meaningless parody. Taking liberties with history is a tricky business and can only come from the very best of writers - Mr Barker is not one of them. And like so many American films where history has been rewritten for exploitative reason this play falls into the same trap, mixing fiction with fact and achieving neither. The only reason I can imagine for exhuming this piece now was that the Arcola theatre and Iceni productions thought that with the current economic crisis shaking global capitalism to its very foundations it would have something to say to an audience - think on!...

Read more and add your own review