The Brilliance of the Servant without qualities: Bare life and the horde offstage

ABSTRACT

In investigating the nature of plethora and bare sufficiency onstage, Howard Barker pursues the limit case between the possible and the impossible that has haunted the theatre since the Attic tragedy. This article explores the ways in which the playwright makes use of the offstage space as a repository for the unknowable future, the spatially excluded as a site for the temporally excluded. I read a lesser-known work of Barker's, The Brilliance of the Servant, as the sacrifice of bare life to unknown potentiality, where the eponymous servant submits to the torture of a horde of barbarians occupying the offstage space. Like the messenger of the classical tragedy, this figure traversing the border between the scene and obscene announces a new kind of characterless character, without desire and without objectives, but rich with a plethora of messages.

KEYWORDS:

• Howard Barker
• offstage
• catastrophe
• Giorgio Agamben
• bare life
• potentiality