Word: barker
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What she gets with Howard Barker's Victory, which opened at the Wharf Theatre last week, is not so much a loaded gun as a full-firing AK-47. An ageing enfant terrible of British theater, playwright Barker creates his own "theatre of catastrophe" by taking aim at history, whether the 1683 Siege of Vienna in The Europeans or the 1571 Battle of Lepanto in Scenes From an Execution. With Victory, for which Davis auditioned when it premiered at London's Royal Court in 1984, the battlefield is the post?Civil War reign of Charles...
...What kind of monarchy is this?" the returned Stuart (Colin Friels) asks his court, breeches round his ankles, having just had his way with his mistress Devonshire (Marta Dusseldorp). It's the Restoration, silly. And Barker trots out his defeated Puritans, dim-witted landowners and disgruntled cavaliers as lambs to be slaughtered by his withering wit: Milton on amphetamines (the poet, too, gets his comeuppance). It's an actor's feast, of course, with 36 roles shared among 11 players in this production, although the best one is saved for Davis, who co-directs with Benjamin Winspear...
...some critics, what Sondheim and book writer John Weidman put onstage in 1991 was disaster enough. A carnival barker, under neon signs blaring HIT THE PREZ! WIN A PRIZE!, opens the show by luring in a parade of customers like John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley and Charles Guiteau, the "disappointed office seeker" who shot President James A. Garfield. Hinckley and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme--wannabe assassins of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, respectively--sing a duet about unrequited love, in their cases for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. One musical number ends in an electrocution, another in a hanging. Samuel Byck...
...other panelists—“Ghosts of Rwanda” producer Greg Barker and Kennedy School Lecturer and Pulitzer Prize Winner Samantha Power—stressed institutional denial of the genocide and the reasons for the United Nations’ failure to intervene. Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Michael Ignatieff moderated...
Dallaire and Barker denied that Kofi Annan, the current U.N. secretary general who headed the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations, got off too easily for his failure to act in the Rwandan crisis. Dallaire said Boutros Boutros-Ghali, secretary general at the time, deserved more blame than he received...