ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most highly acclaimed of Barker’s plays to date has been The Castle which was first performed as part of the ‘Barker season’ in the RSC Pit at the Barbican in 1985. At that time, the drama was widely perceived as being principally concerned with the Reaganite intensification of the arms race and with ‘Greenham Common’ style feminist oppositional values; this connection, while not without substance, does not dominate the play and certainly does not sanction the extrapolation of simple political or social ‘messages’. The text comprises one of the richest and most densely written of Barker’s entire oeuvre, providing an intellectual canvas surpassing in its breadth while simultaneously depending upon a symbolic weave of astonishing economy and tight integration. In this final chapter, I wish to examine this major work in some depth, an exercise which will entail an examination of literary/symbolic elements as well dramatic considerations since both are relevant to the theoretical concepts of seduction I have advanced.
