Between Two Worlds

Abstract

The Collins New National Dictionary (1959) defines ‘institution’ as ‘an organised pattern of group behaviour established and generally accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, such as slavery’; and ‘ideal’ as ‘a. existing in fancy only; satisfying desires; — n. an imaginary type or norm of perfection to be aimed at’. Barker’s plays of the late 1970s reflect the contemporary political climate in their fundamental sense of the disjunction between social institutions and the ideals which they ostensibly embody, of the individual’s alienation from the real and severance from the possibility of the ideal. His principal characters are shown in conflict with the institutions they encounter or represent, straining towards reformulations of possibility, however inarticulated, dimly sensed or doomed to failure; or they are middlemen caught in a crossfire between largely anonymous institutional forces, incapable of associating themselves permanently with either side. This may provide fragile reassurance of human resistance to theoretical rigour, but also bodes ill for their chances of worldly success or survival in a climate which demands this submission of self. In reply, the institutions bolster their own insecurities with brutal demonstrations of power.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born

Matthew Arnold; epigraph to That Good Between Us

But there is always this yawning gulf between what you know and what you do about it.

Birth on a Hard Shoulder