Drama. Barker's recent work, now firmly part of the international repertoire, is characterized by an ever deepening investment in language and metaphor; a poet of the stage, his texts resonate at many levels of the European cultural past and illuminate its present. The plays in this volume review the roles of two legendary women in fiction--Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and Snow White's Wicked Stepmother--placing them at centre stage and offering a fresh interpretation of their attitudes and actions.