Howard Barker's alter-ego Eduardo Houth first materialized as the photographer of publicity images for Barker's theatre company The Wrestling School, one among many fictional identities assumed by him to screen a range of his activities, including set and costume design. Writing about himself in the third person and in the past tense, the result is a unique exercise in self-description.

The theatre of Howard Barker subverts myth and invents history in its pursuit of the meaning of individual integrity. Repudiating politics and asserting the primacy of the emotions, Barker's tragedy is written in a language by turns poetic and brutally mundane. The effects are disconcerting and destabilizing, as he insists tragedy must be. The twelfth and final collection of plays from this celebrated, influential and widely-studied playwright includes: At Her Age and Hers, which uses Velazquez's painting Las Meninas to meditate on the making of a work of art, removing the figures from the...