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Edward Bond, a Distinctive Voice in Modern British Drama
Lector dr. Diana PRESADĂ,
Universitatea Petrol-Gaze Ploieşti
An iconoclast of modern British drama and one of Britain’s greatest living contemporary
dramatists, Edward Bond emerged from a group of left-wing writers who joined the experimental
fringe theatre in the 1970s. His daunting debates about moral standards, as well as the stylistic
pluralism of his plays, constitute the distinguishing features of ‘a new theatre’ whose intended
purpose has been viewed as an attack on British complacency. His second play, Saved, performed at
the Royal Court Theatre in 1965, caused controversy because of the horrific scene involving the
stoning to death of a baby in its pram by a group of bored young men. Although the play was
banned by the Lord Chamberlain, it brought Bond’s name to public attention. As a matter of fact,
‘the most uncompromising, original and un-English English play of the sixties’ (Observer), a time
when plays were still censored, made known a new stage vision that aimed at challenging selfsatisfied attitudes through concrete visual images meant to illustrate the cruelty and moral
degradation of contemporary life.
Bond is expert at creating surprising theatrical metaphors that are acted out in a direct way
in order to materialize the evils of society, namely, ‘what society does when it is heavy with
aggression’. As the dramatist is firmly committed to humanistic values, he enjoys protesting against
social and political injustice in a loud voice. Like his German predecessor, Bertolt Brecht, Bond is
concerned with orienting the audience toward reflection rather than emotional contemplation of the
stage incidents. As he has put it:
Theatre is a way of judging society and helping to change it; art must interpret the world
and not merely mirror it. (Notebooks of Edward Bond, volume 1, page 34).
For that reason his work lays emphasis on the contradictions of a class-structured society,
disclosing its destructive effects on individuals and drawing attention to the impossibility of any
social improvement as long as political action is ineffective. Although themes such as
dehumanization, violence or alienation are frequently dealt with by his contemporaries, Bond’s
viewpoint on the mission of theatre is totally different:
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes
and obsesses our society and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. (Notebooks of
Edward Bond, volume 1, page 34).
His outspoken didactic intention of reforming society through a rational theatre that tells the
truth links him to the great tradition of the theatre of ideas, whereas his craftsmanship owes much to
a great variety of sources. It has been said that his concentrated theatrical images suggest the
concreteness of Shakespeare’s imagery and that his dramaturgic method derives from Artaud,
Brecht and Beckett. Moreover, his great skill at controlling the realistic dialogue is reminiscent of
the enigmatic theatre of Chekhov and Pinter. It is this theatrical complexity that has made critics
label his artistic creation as colloquial, poetic and visionary.
Bond’s impressive imagination and interest in experimentation provide a farcical base for
his drama. Early Mornings (1968), the last play to be banned in its entirety by the Lord
Chamberlain, is a surrealistic historical fantasy that involves the main figures of the Victorian stage.
Its intriguing ‘coda’ depicts a kind of cannibalistic heaven that reaches the gargantuan dimensions
of a metaphor standing for universal consumption. This nightmarish farce with flavour of mockheroism debunks the Victorian values in an obvious attempt to disturb society’s comfort with
tradition or with the history-book idealizations that justify the present political system and its
institutions. Consequently, the personalities of that time, Queen Victoria, Disraeli and Gladstone are
grotesquely caricatured: the two prime ministers embody gangsters craving for power, Queen
Victoria dresses Florence Nightingale as John Brown to cover her lesbian proclivities, while the
mythical character, Prince Arthur, drags round him the Siamese twin. Behind all these burlesque
elements we recognize ordinary human feelings, commonplace situations and the dramatist’s
deftness at portraying characters in flesh and blood. The originality of the play also lies in the gothic
atmosphere, the handling of nonsensical events, and the surreal pantomime techniques: Arthur loses
his head or the rest of him and is ridiculously hidden under the skirts of Florence Nightingale who
desperately tries to save him from being totally devoured. The dramatist’s pessimistic view of
present society has been converted into a scenic metaphor that critics have excellently described as:
… a world in which dog eats dog, the characters’ hunger for power in life becoming after their
death simply a ravenous hunger satisfied in an endless round of cannibalistic feasts (New British
Drama in Performance on the British Stage 1970-1985, page 90).
The message of the play is conveyed through the plot, in fact, a stunning unfolding of
episodes and graphic images: Prince Albert, who wants to be a lively ghost, struggles hard to escape
from the vast chains which constantly pull him back inside his tomb. In spite of the ludicrous end of
the play, the resurrection of Prince Arthur, the suffering character who prefers to be consumed
rather than consume his fellows, urges the audience to ponder on the future. Prince Arthur’s
growing awareness or conviction that there could be an alternative to the present opens new
perspectives.
Bond diversifies his critical comments on social and political issues in Narrow Road to the
Deep North (1968). The Japanese haiku poet, Matsui Basho, is the protagonist of a play that blends
myth with reality and ends with showing the British imperialists as the worst representatives of
power. It was completely revised as The Bundle (1978) and turned into a complex dramatic creation
that enlarges the topic by focusing on a daring comparison between two ideologies and political
systems: fascism and imperialism as forms of government.
Despite his dark outlook on life, Bond can sometimes be a good-humoured writer, as in The
Pope’s Wedding (1962), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1976) and Bingo (1974), where his convictions
about culture, society and morality resurface as incisively as in his most provocative plays. The
Pope’s Wedding might be mistaken for a piece of faithful realism due to the naturalistic details,
blunt dialogues and slow action that re-create every day life. But the treatment of murder, whose
motivation remains unknown, heralds Bond’s dramatic method. As Richard Allen Cave writes:
He pares down, stylises, minimalises to a degree where the austerity of what is left becomes
richly allusive (New British Drama in Performance on the British Stage 1970-1985, page 97).
The Sea, one of his most fascinating pieces, charts the molding of a romantic spirit
incarnated by John Clare, a lyric poet who speaks on behalf of other people, voicing their
experiences and emotions. In Bingo the dramatist takes Shakespeare himself as its central character.
Seeking quiet at Stratford, the bard is trapped between his frustrated family (a sick wife and an
embittered daughter, Judith) and external influences, being finally drawn by his friend Combe, a
local landowner, into collusion in the agricultural enclosures that disinherited rural population
(when Combe encloses some land for sheep-grazing, Shakespeare signs the paper that safeguards
his income, thus depriving the poor farmers of their livelihood). In the latter half of the play, while
talking with Ben Jobson, Shakespeare becomes aware of his complicity in social oppression. The
psychological contradictions which are responsible for Shakespeare’s moral failure originate in his
bourgeois consciousness and also in his idealism that will lead him to unbearable remorse followed
by suicide. The drama highlights the relationship between private conscience and social justice, but
it is the audience that has to ponder over Shakespeare’s last question, ‘was anything done? ’.
The satire on Victorian society is at its best in Lear (1971), where the anachronisms and the
kaleidoscopic technique hint permanently at our time. The play is a fine reworking of Shakespeare’s
King Lear but the well-known source is barely recognizable. As Bond is profoundly concerned with
the world of the 20th century, he provides a new context for the character’s actions (Gloucester’s
tortures and blindness are transferred to Lear who is usurped by his daughters, Bodice and
Fontanelle; the dethroned king is put on farcical trial, loses his sanity in prison and dies in old age
while trying to pull down the Great Wall which keeps his people in bondage; Cordelia, far from
being a loving and trustworthy daughter, is a more ruthless tyrant than her sisters who depose Lear).
As customary with Bond, the central theme is violence tinged with horror and cruelty. Yet, the
dramatic effects of the play are counterbalanced by the use of slang, colloquialism and humour
constituting a specific ambience that takes the audience away from the Shakespearian scene in order
to make them judge the significance of each episode in Bond’s own terms.
Lear’s self-centredness or inability to care about the others seems to be the normal reaction
of an individual who lives in an insane world. The playwright has admirably made the essential
point:
Men are not innately violent but are driven to react violently when they feel trapped within
an irrational and inhumane political system or when they are too frightened to admit the possibility
of change. (Notebooks of Edward Bond, volume 1, page 50).
But just like his Shakespearian counterpart, Lear surpasses his initial moral lowness through
suffering. The progress towards self-knowledge is suggested by the hero’s blindness which turns
him into an Oedipean figure. ‘I must become a child…I must open my eyes and see!’ he declares
before being mutilated. The episodic structure of the play reflects his evolution progressively. There
is a significant difference between the opening scene in which he shoots a worker in order to make
the people speed up the building of the wall surrounding his kingdom and the final scene in which
he himself is shot for trying to hack away the selfsame wall. Finally Lear grasps the real meaning of
freedom and consequently attacks the symbol of slavery hoping that the others will follow his
example.
Alongside the marvellous rewriting of Shakespeare, Bond uses historical settings to expose
modern injustice in The Woman (1978), a version of the Trojan War with Hecuba as a main
character, and in Restoration (1981), a play in which the eighteenth-century England appears as a
world of unshakeable privileges of the ruling classes. The vivid rhythm of the action that
intermingles with songs in Brechtian manner and the theatrical force of the whole dramatic structure
testify to Bond’s great gift as a comic moralist. His interest in difficult subjects examined within the
context of every day life is evident in The War Plays (Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People,
Great Peace-1985), where he envisages life after the nuclear holocaust, which, in the writer’s words
‘is the only subject – directly or by reflection – for art. Art engages (within the artist’s limitations)
its spectators in such a way that they wish – or (frankly) are forced – to re-create themselves in
experiencing it: they can only experience it by judging it…The standards by which we judge art are
those by which we live. Art either liberates or imperils’. (Notebooks of Edward Bond, volume 2,
page 68)
Edward Bond is the representative of a new theatrical formula that is distinct from the
realism of the ‘kitchen sink’ trend. Preoccupied with the contradictions of a society based on class,
the dramatist highlights the social, economic and political factors which shape the protagonists’
consciousness. His notable use of language is designed to illustrate a complex process. Ranging
from the naturalistic dialect of his working class characters to the poetic reflections of Shakespeare,
the different types of discourse reveal how ideology influences human behaviour. Although the
unfolding of the plot in scenic units is of Brechtian order, Bond’s dramatic style is highly personal.
Visual poetic images, a logical cause-effect structure, as well as dialectical relationships involving
characters, plot construction and dramatic movement, constitute the distinctive characteristics of an
outstanding dramatic creation which, as John Russell Brown writes,
tries to understand the present day crisis and to show potential for achieving a sane society
(A Short Guide to Modern British Drama, page 62).
Exploring the meeting point between ideology and the art of the writer, Edward Bond’s
controversial and influential plays continue to offer a wide-ranging political and moral critique of
human society, paving the way for a radical new theatre of the future.
Bibliography
Banham, Martin (editor). 1988. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Bond Edward. 2000-20001. Notebooks of Edward Bond. London: Methuen London Ltd
Bradbury Malcom (editor). 1981. Contemporary English Drama. Stratford: Stratford-Upon-Avon
Studies
Brown, John Russell. 1982. A Short Guide to Modern British Drama. London: Heinemann
Educational Books
Cave, Richard Allen. 1987. New British Drama in Performance on the British Stage 1970-1985.
London: Colin Smythe Gerrards Cross
Worth, Katharine. 1973. Revolutions in Modern English Drama. London: Methuen London Ltd