soul," says the Russian playwright. "Its pitiful dimensions. It is smaller than an aspirin that fizzles in a glass. . ." But Chekhov dies, and Vanya finds the resoluteness to stride out of the confines of his creator's world. Barker's protagonists are conflicted, often perverse, and their motivations appear enigmatic. In A Hard Heart, Riddler, described by the playwright as "A Woman of Originality" is called upon to use her considerable brilliance in fortifications and tactics to save her besieged city. But each choice she makes seems to render the city more vulnerable to attack, but that outcome seems to exhilarate rather than upset her. "My mind was engine-like in its perfection," she exults in the midst of destruction.< Barker's heroes are drawn into the heart of the paradoxical, fascinated by contradiction. The 1995 edition of the encyclopaedic The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes Barker as a playwright "adept at choosing telling dramatic situations in which many different incidents can take place, but he reverses what might be regarded as the moral expectations [as well as] the expected moral order of capitalist societies. […] Barker deliberately attempts to upset expectations, denying the value of reason, continuity and naturalism, but there is a certain predictability about his wildness. His characters seem to be at emotional extremes, to speak in the same overwrought, rhetorical language." Productions Barker has acknowledged he has had greater success as playwright internationally than in his home country of Britain and many of his plays have been translated into other languages. He has noted that his plays have been more successful when performed abroad in America, Australia and Europe, especially mainland Europe where Barker has been celebrated as "one of the major writers of modern European theatre". In Britain, Barker is "largely unknown" and he has been described as "cut[ing] a Byronic dash in British Theatre – sardonic, dethatched, the insider's outsider." Barker's work has influenced and inspired a number of notable British playwrights, including Sarah Kane, David Greig, Lucy Kirkwood, and Dennis Kelly. Noted actors Ian McDiarmid and Fiona Shaw have received acclaim for their performances in Barker's plays. In Britain, Howard Barker formed "The Wrestling School" Company in 1988 to produce his own work in his native country. There has been a small flurry of productions of Barker's plays on the London Fringe since 2007, including some non-Wrestling school productions which seem to fare better critically.