Elisabeth Angel-Perez’s scientific contributions

This chapter discusses the biographical landmarks of Howard Baker and his career in theatre. A poet at heart, Barker places language at the centre of a new dramatic form better adapted to express the complexity of the modern man: the Theatre of Catastrophe. Barker's early plays could at first sight be compared to sociopolitical theatre and manifest a clear Brechtian influence, a testimony to the long‐lasting impact of the Berliner Ensemble's visit to England in 1956. Barker deprives the audience of every reference they could cling to: an identifiable space, a recognizable temporality, psychologically defined characters. What characterizes the end of the millennium and a third phase in Barker's manner of writing is precisely that the Theatre of Catastrophe shifts from the historical epic focus to a more intimate form of theatre. Catastrophe focuses on the crisis of the subject proper inasmuch as the subject crystallizes the anxieties of the age.

This article argues that on the post-Adornian British experimental stage, wit has become a privileged place to cradle and harbour catastrophe. It analyses the way such In-Yer-Ear post-Beckettian playwrights as Harold Pinter, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill or Alice Birch explore the intrinsic tragic nature of wit and turn witticisms into the genuine locus of tragedy, thus engraving the tragic feeling at the heart of laughter. Doing so, they redefine both the architecture of tragedy and the nature of contemporary wit.