Precisely what occurred on the last night in the lives of the Russian
Imperial family remains forever shrouded in mystery. How they met their
deaths at the hands of the revolutionaries will never be known. In just
such an absence of historical knowledge, Howard Barker's dramatic instinct
has flourished. Here, as in other vacant spaces of the European experience,
he has speculated on events and motives in that particular form of tragedy
identified by him as Catastrophic Theatre - poetic, metaphoric,
unobjective, emotional. Here, the protagonist is the children's tutor
Dancer, catapulted to power but bent on ends which barely coincide with
official ideologies. In search of an immaculate form of love, this aspiring
saint swings between cruelty and pity, murdering with comic abandon all
those exponents of party discipline who stand between himself and the
realization of a dream. His own sacrifice, an adieu to the twentieth
century when its melancholy span has barely begun, is the apotheosis
of a sensibility, and Dancer stands out as one of Barker's most extraordinary
stage creations. |
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