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Further Information on Dr David Barnett:

David Barnett was appointed Lecturer in Drama at UCD in January 2004, having spent five years teaching Drama at the University of Huddersfield. Trained as a linguist at the Universities of Nottingham and Bristol, he took at DPhil at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on the ‘postmodern Brecht’, Heiner Müller, in 1996. The study assessed the relationship between text and performance in Müller’s difficult later plays and was published as Literature versus Theatre in 1998.

David is interested in the theoretical and the practical aspects of drama, and has directed plays by dramatists such as Shakespeare, Webster, Brecht and Müller in the past decade. David has also published two German-language plays in English, one of which was Eskalation Ordinär by Werner Schwab, translated as Escalation: Obscene. He directed this play at the first Festival of Contemporary European Plays in Huddersfield, 2000.

In the academic year 2001-2, David was awarded a sabbatical to Germany as a Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation to carry out research into the renowned film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his activities in the theatre. A book-length study was published in 2005, offering an historical and aesthetic investigation into Fassbinder as the writer of sixteen plays and the director of numerous works in the theatre.

David has worked extensively on contemporary German drama and has published on a range of dramatists. The relationship between formal innovation, performance practices and politics is a focus for some of the work, and this extends into David’s interest in metadrama and metatheatre. The category of theatricality in a postmodern world asks many questions and several dramas of recent years have engaged with theatre’s self-reflexive meditations on the ‘crisis of representation’. David has also worked on the ‘postdramatic theatre’, a theatre beyond representation, explored the types of dramaturgies that give rise to it, and its possibilities for new modes of performance.

Future plans include a book-length study of metatheatre. He is also reworking the book on Fassbinder for publication in Germany.

Select Bibliography for Dr David Barnett:

On Heiner Müller

Literature versus Theatre. Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1998)
‘Some notes on the difficulties of operating Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine’, German Life and Letters, 48 (1995), no. 1, pp. 75-85
‘Heiner Müller as the End of Brechtian Dramaturgy. Müller on Brecht in Two Lesser-Known Fragments.’, Theatre Research International, 27 (2002), no. 1, pp. 49-57
‘Collective Dramaturgy. A Marxist Challenge to the Stage. Or: Heiner Müller’s Political Theatre of Destruction’, in Ian Wallace, Dennis Tate and Gerd Labroise (eds), Heiner Müller. Probleme und Perspektiven (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp, 45-55
‘Resisting the Revolution. Heiner Müller’s Hamlet/Machine at the Deutsches Theater, March, 1990’, in Nigel Wheale and Edward Esche (eds), Shakespeare in Performance, in press 2004
‘Heiner Müller vertonen. Heiner Goebbels and the Music of Postmodern Memory’, chapter in Lutz Koeppen and Nora Alter (eds), Sound Matters. Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture, in press 2004

On Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
‘Dramaturgies of Sprachkritik. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Blut am Hals der Katze and Peter Handke’s Kaspar’, Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), no. 4, pp. 1053-1063 (Article reprinted in Drama Criticism, 17(2002), pp. 95-101.)
‘The Simulation of a Reception. Or: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Der Müll, die Stadt und Tod in Germany, Holland, and Israel’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14:2 (2004), pp. 29-40

On Metatheatre and Documentary Drama

‘The Holocaust and Documentary Metadrama. Heinar Kipphardt’s Bruder Eichmann’, in Pol O’ Dochartaigh (ed.), Jews in German Literature since 1945: German-Jewish Literature? (=German Monitor no. 53)(Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp.587-98.
‘Access Denied. Werner Schwab, the Explosion of Character and the Collapse of the Play-within-a-Play’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes and Julian Preece (eds), The New German Literature: Popular and International? (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 281-94
‘Documentation and its Discontents. The Case of Heiner Kipphardt’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 27 (2001), no. 3, pp. 272-85
‘Howard Barker: Polemic Theory and Dramatic Practice. Nietzsche, Metatheatre and the Play The Europeans, Modern Drama, 44 (2001), no. 4, pp.458-75 (actually published late 2002)

On other German Dramatists

‘Tactical Realisms: Hochhuth’s Wessis in Weimar and Kroetz’s Ich bin das Volk’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parks and Julian Preece (eds.), Whose Story? Continuities in Contemporary German-Language Literature (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 181-95
‘Joseph Goebbels: Expressionist Dramatist and Nazi Minister of Culture’, New Theatre Quarterly, 17 (2001), no. 2, pp. 161-9 (An accompanying, more general article appeared in the THES on 20 April 2001 under the title, ‘Goebbels: A Complex Drama in Two Acts’.)
‘“Da draussen sind Hunderte von solchen wie Sie einer sind”. The Triumph of the Market and the Persistence of Dialectics in Urs Widmer’s Top Dogs’, Forum Modernes Theater, 18 (2003), no. 2, pp. 153-64
‘Televisualizing Racism on Stage. Elfriede Jelinek’s Stecken, Stab und Stangl’, in Janet Stewart and Simon Ward (eds), Blueprints for No-Man's Land: Connections in Contemporary Austrian Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 95-110

On Postdramatic Theatre

‘Text as Material? The Category of “Performativity” in Three Postdramatic German Theatre-Texts’, in Carolin Duttlinger, Lucia Ruprecht and Andrew Webber (eds), Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies, (Frankfurt/Main et al: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 137-57
 Resisting Easy Consumption. The Politics of Form in Selected Plays of the Berlin Republic’, in Birgit Haas (ed.), Macht: Performativität, Performanz und Polittheater seit 1990 (Königshausen and Neumann: Würzburg, 2005), pp. 167-81.
‘Reading and Performing Uncertainty: Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and the Postdramatic Theatre’, Theatre Research International, 30:2 (2005), pp. 139-49
‘Political Theatre in a Shrinking World. René Pollesch’s Postdramatic Practices on Paper and Onstage’, in press, Contemporary Theatre Review



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