Towards the end of Tom Cairns’ fine production, there is a moment of exquisite non-contact as the artist Galactia, being freed from her Venetian prison, does not quite grasp the hand of her former lover and fellow painter Carpeta. The moment extended, and still further, forming a tableau of non-connection… until the stage manager informed the press-night house that a technical hitch had halted the action. It made a useful emblem for what Cairns and his cast bring to this play which is normally absent from Howard Barker’s work.
    
The last major London production of a Barker piece, other than by his own dedicated company The Wrestling School, was the 1990 stage premiere of this same play, written six years earlier for radio. There is a school of opinion, led once again by Barker, that his neglect by the British theatrical establishment (including the Arts Council, which ceased funding The Wrestling School in 2007) is because he offers too strong medicine. Strong undoubtedly, but not necessarily medicinal. I used to lament that a moment’s lapse of concentration during one of Barker’s rigorous staged moral examinations meant one was vainly playing catch-up for the rest of the evening; I now realise that one feels like that anyway. His work is like a stick of bitter rock: take a cross-section through it at any point, and the message is the same: THINK! NO! THINK HARDER! NO! REALLY THINK!
    
Scenes From An Execution is not in fact as remorseless as many of his plays. Even as Galactia turns her civic commission, a vast canvas commemorating the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, into a gruesome vista of the horror of war rather than the intended celebration of Venetian values, even as the complex relationships between artist, critic, patron and society are dissected, Cairns and company find great humour and an enduring human warmth. For once these characters are not mere animated propositions in an austere sermon. Fiona Shaw is of course beautifully suited to play Galactia, being both fearsomely intelligent and by nature an enemy of misplaced earnestness. This is an impassioned protagonist, but her passion is about her life and work, not an abstract passion about the crucial necessity of passion. Tim McInnerny’s Doge is (although he may rightly loathe the glibness of the analogy) often as bathetic as his Captain Darling in BBC-TV’s Blackadder, but with it he displays political nous rather than military stupidity. Foremost among a strong supporting cast are Jamie Ballard as Carpeta, Robert Hands as the Doge’s admiral brother and Phoebe Nicholls as the critic who masterminds a policy of repressive tolerance towards Galactia’s defiance. Cairns and designer Hildegard Bechtler use the Lyttelton’s stage to evoke the scale of the vast yet unseen canvas, and implicitly that of the issues themselves. If only Barker could learn to stage his own work this sensitively.
     
Written for the Financial Times.