Daily Inspiration Quote by Howard Barker

Barker comes out swinging at the moralizing impulse that haunts a lot of “serious” art: the writer as civic tutor, looming over the audience with a lesson plan. “Suffocated” is the key word. It frames enlightenment not as liberation but as smothering - a kind of benevolent tyranny where the artist’s “truths” crowd out the audience’s room to think, feel, or misread. He’s not rejecting meaning; he’s rejecting the performance of certainty.

Then he pivots to theatre as “secret,” and the argument gets seductively paradoxical. Theatre is the most public of arts - bodies on a stage, tickets sold - yet Barker insists its beauty lies in what can’t be fully disclosed. A secret isn’t just hidden information; it’s a social bond. It creates an inside and an outside, a conspiratorial intimacy between performer and spectator. That’s why “secrets seduce us”: they don’t lecture, they lure. They make the audience complicit rather than corrected.

The subtext is also a warning about the culture of explanation: playwrights (and institutions) that pre-chew ambiguity into “relevance,” “impact,” and tidy takeaways. Barker’s theatre wants desire, danger, and opacity - the kind of experience you carry out of the room half-articulated, itching to tell someone but unable to translate it cleanly. The “sharing” of secrets isn’t disclosure; it’s contagion. You don’t leave with a truth. You leave with an obsession.