With his steely intellectualism, dogged eschewal of naturalism and ornate language, Howard Barker never makes it easy for his audiences.

His new play, presented by his dedicated company the Wrestling School and directed by Gerrard McArthur, typically refuses to offer the viewer so much as a crumb of comfort in the shape of characterisation or emotional involvement. But its uncompromising starkness and terse use of visual, aural and linguistic imagery are arresting, and with a duration of just 70 minutes the piece manages to sustain our interest. And if the satisfactions of work so concerned with engaging the head over the heart remain limited, Barker and McArthur offer some interesting sociological and psychological propositions, albeit with a coolness that is at its best elegant, but at worst feels dramatically constipated.

The play is inspired by Thucydides’ account of an Athenian military disaster in 413 BC. News of the carnage was casually delivered by a barber’s customer mid-shave — and it is this incident, and the human response to violent catastrophe, that forms the focus of the action. A barber (George Irving) receives a barechested, creepily smiling visitor (Duncan Bell) in his austere shop. “Do you like bad news?” the customer asks. “I do.”

As the barber sets to work on his hair, the man relishes the prospect of revealing the full awful extent of his tidings. But it is the barber who, in an act of imagination, describes the terrible destruction in which his only son has perished, an event of such power that it will fascinate and possess the entire city.

The sense of horror swells; Paul Bull and Tom Lishman’s sound design fills the air, first with the snicking of the barber’s scissors, then with strange gulping, wetly chewing noises and finally with wails of grief. The human appetite for horror, the power relations between server and served, the sacrifice of individualism when a soldier becomes part of an army or a citizen part of a state — these themes run through the exchanges of Irving’s darkly intense barber and Bell’s disquietingly urbane visitor, who seems part goading demon, part implacable god. We think of our wartorn modern world, of our insatiable voyeurism, of the way in which we watch our freedoms increasingly circumscribed in the name of security.

Barker’s approach to such notions, though, remains obstinately oblique. His interest in violence as a defining quality of our culture intrigues; as a dramatist he is often frustrating, but he remains reliably provocative.

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