Art & Creativity Quote by Howard Barker

Barker’s line is a declaration of war on the comforting idea that theatre exists to improve you. “Not giving a lecture” rejects the civic, syllabus-style drama that arrives with its morals pre-highlighted. He wants the stage to behave less like a classroom and more like a lab where human impulses are observed under heat: “speculating on behavior” frames writing as an experiment, not a verdict. The word “speculating” matters because it’s risky, provisional, even flirtatious. It implies the playwright doesn’t stand above the characters as judge or therapist; he stands among them, tempted by the same mess.

“Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be” is a bracing refusal of cultural safety rails. Barker is staking out an ethics of discomfort: if drama never threatens the audience’s self-image, it’s probably just confirming it. The danger isn’t only scandal or offense; it’s the more intimate threat of being implicated. His theatre aims to produce complicity, not catharsis.

“Theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it” lands as both aesthetic and political. “Light” is the language of clarity, uplift, transparency - the kinds of values institutions love to sponsor. Barker’s subtext is that too much illumination becomes surveillance: it forces characters (and audiences) to perform virtue. Darkness, for him, is where contradiction survives intact, where desire isn’t immediately translated into a lesson. In the context of late-20th-century British theatre - with its strong tradition of social realism and issue-driven plays - Barker is marking his territory against moral consensus, insisting that art’s job is not to tidy the world but to reveal the parts we keep unlit on purpose.