Howard Barker is an English playwright, stage director and poet who also wrote for various other media, including the radio, the opera and the screen. In 1993, he wrote his first puppet play – All He Fears – as a commission for the Movingstage Theatre Company, as part of the Brighton Festival. At the time, Barker was completely unfamiliar with puppet theatre. He left aside all questions related to the staging of the play during the process of writing. He claims to proceed in same way when writing for actors’ theatre. In 2001, Barker wrote a second play for puppets – The Swing at Night.

Barker refers to his dramatic work as a “Theatre of Catastrophe”. His plays are violent and visceral and rely heavily on the bodies of actors. Yet, his chance meeting with puppetry allowed him to convey a different kind of excess in his work. As objects, puppets suggest the uncanny to him: they are manipulated by actors, look like humans, but their bodies are made out of dead material. Barker thus explored the conflicting emotions which puppet theatre can achieve, as the puppets mimic human behaviours. In this regard, they embody a form of human self-awareness to him. Barker is particularly interested in the expressive potential of puppets and the intentionality of their gestures. He believes that stage actors can hardly replicate them. The discontinuity between the puppets’ perfect diction and their strange, awkward movements suited Barker’s rejection of realism, which pervades actors’ theatre according to him.