INTRODUCTION

I was keen to do a play by one of the writers who were linguistically orientated and belonged to the tradition of, if you like, intellectual socialists-Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Howard Barker.1

The overt and consciously political slant of this company tended to obscure for many critics other less immediately categorisable facets of Barker’s plays. So, Ronald Hayman could write of The Hang of the Gaol:

What is ultimately stultifying for the audience is the inescapable feeling that each confrontation is being rigged to serve as an illustration for a thesis about class-war, that the dialogue is being written not to penetrate more searchingly into the theatrical reality which the fiction is generating, but to vent a spleen that existed in toto before Howard Barker began to concern himself with these characters or this situation. His interest in people and behaviour is secondary.2