Download Bingo - Young Vic

A Young Vic production
Bingo
By Edward Bond
Contents
1.
Edward Bond
2.
The Works of Edward Bond
3.
Synopsis
4.
Cast and Creative Team
5.
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death
6.
Edward Bond’s William Shakespeare
7.
Land Enclosures
8.
The Royal Court Theatre
9.
Heightened Text: A Drama Exercise
10.
Bibliography
If you have any questions or comments about this Resource Pack please contact us:
The Young Vic, 66 The Cut, London, SE1 8LZ
T: 020 7922 2800 F: 020 7922 2801 e: [email protected]
Compiled by: Adam Penford
Young Vic 2012
First performed at the Young Vic on Thursday 16 February 2012
Rehearsal and production photographs by Catherine Ashmore
The Young Vic Teachers Programme is supported by:
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A Young Vic production
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1. EDWARD BOND
Edward Bond is considered one of the greatest living British playwrights and has written over fifty works.
Over the last forty years, Bond’s fractured relationship with the British theatrical establishment has
attracted as much attention as his plays. He described the National Theatre as “a technical sewer” and
the Royal Shakespeare Company as “trivialising and vulgarising Shakespeare in a way that is truly
barbarous”. Recently, prominent British companies have begun to revive his hit plays, re-establishing a
tentative relationship with one of our most challenging, but innovative, playwrights.
Edward Bond
Bond was born in Holloway, London on 18 July 1934. Whilst he was evacuated as a child to East Anglia
for a period of time during World War II, he did also witness some of the horrors of the Blitz, and a
sense of violence and danger is often present in his work. His family were lower-working class; his father,
an agricultural labourer, could not read. Bond himself had little education and was not allowed to take
his Eleven-plus examination to see if he qualified for grammar schooling. The social injustices of his
working-class childhood were a profound force in shaping his political thoughts that later manifested
themselves in his plays. He left school aged 15 and had various factory and office jobs, before doing his
national service [a year’s service in the military, compulsory in the UK until 1960] in 1953 as part of the
post-war occupation forces in Vienna. Bond was struck by the undercurrents of violence in the city which
contrasted with the pretence of normal life being played out on the surface. Upon returning to London,
he decided to start writing for the theatre.
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Bond had first been introduced to theatre through the form of music hall as a child; his sister was a
magician’s assistant and the young Bond used to watch her being sawn in half. Aged 14, he was taken on
a school trip to see a production of Macbeth which proved a revelation: “I obviously didn’t understand a
lot of it, but I understood enough of it, and it was the first time that anybody had spoken to me seriously
about my life [...] I’d lived through a war and been bombed so I knew all about Macbeth being a tyrant,
but it seemed to me that somebody was telling the truth.” After returning from Vienna, Bond watched as
much theatre as he could and began to hone his writing skills by penning short dramatic sketches. After
submitting two plays to the Royal Court theatre, the London home of new writing, he was asked to
become a member of its writers’ group in 1958, studying alongside other playwrights.
A production photo from the 1965 Royal Court production of Saved
In 1962, Bond’s play, The Pope’s Wedding, was staged at the Royal Court in a Sunday evening
‘performance without decor’ [simply staged, with minimal set and costume] - his first professional
performance - but it was in 1965 that he made his name with the now infamous, Saved. The play
explored a group of young, working-class South Londoners struggling to survive in deplorable economic
conditions, and featured sexual and violent acts. The scene which caused the most controversy in the
press showed a group of bored, young males stoning a baby to death in its pram. The Lord Chamberlain,
whose job it was to vet plays that might be not be in the public interest, attempted to censor the stoning
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scene in Saved, but Bond refused to alter it, saying it would fundamentally alter the meaning of the play.
The Royal Court decided to stage the play as a ‘club’ performance, a loophole which the venue had
previously successfully exploited, meaning it was for a private, not public, audience and therefore not
under the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction. They were still prosecuted however and given a conditional
discharge [a sentence without punishment upon the condition that the theatre stops the production]. The
case caused outrage in the theatrical community. Lawrence Olivier [1907-1989], then the Artistic
Director of the National Theatre, argued: “Saved is not a play for children, but it is for grown-ups, and
the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it”. Saved became an international hit,
receiving thirty productions around the world between 1966 and 1969.
Bond’s next play at the Royal Court, Early Morning (1967), also attracted the Lord Chamberlain’s
attention as it featured a lesbian relationship between Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria.
However, the censorship law was repealed in 1968 and the Royal Court celebrated by touring three of
Bond’s plays in the UK and Europe. Lear in 1971 re-imagined Shakespeare’s King Lear and centred on a
paranoid autocrat whose daughters rebel against him. The play featured Bond’s trademark violence; a
machine extracted Lear’s eyeballs and knitting needles pierced a character’s eardrum. The Sea (1973)
was a notably different kind of play from Bond’s previous works, although it still had a sense of danger
and insanity running through its core. Located in a seaside town in 1907, Bond subtitled the play “a
comedy” and it featured one of his now most well-known characters, Lady Raffi, a domineering but
hilarious matriarch. Bingo was produced in 1974, examining Shakespeare’s last years in Stratford as
impotent landlord. The Fool premiered a year later, which also explored the position of the artist in
society, reinterpreting the life of the poet, John Clare.
Up until this point, the Artistic Director of the Royal Court, William Gaskill [1930-], had been Bond’s
greatest champion. They had faced the Lord Chamberlain together, and he had directed all of Bond’s
plays up to, and including, The Sea. The relationship began to break down in the mid-1970s however as
Bond became increasingly more authoritarian about how his work should be staged. Instead, during the
late 1970s, the Royal Shakespeare Company began to stage Bond’s work, although this also proved a
volatile relationship with Bond still complaining that he was not sufficiently consulted on how his plays
were staged. Bond decided the solution was to direct his own work, sometimes making this a condition of
a company being allowed to premiere a work, and in 1978 he directed The Woman at the National
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Theatre. The production was not a great success, Bond blamed the venue for being run “like a biscuit
factory”; the staff and actors blamed Bond for his abstract direction and unrealistic production demands.
In the 1981, Bond wrote a new play, Restoration, which used restoration comedy as parody to explore
the working classes support of Thatcher’s Tory government. The Royal Court, now under the new Artistic
Directorship of Max Stafford-Clark [1941-], allowed him to return to direct it, despite Bond taking
offence when Stafford-Clark made notes in the text’s margins suggesting improvements. Stafford-Clark
later said that Bond was the most difficult man he had ever met and Bond has not worked at the venue
since, refusing to participate in the venue’s 50th anniversary celebrations a few years ago. Bond’s
reputation as a difficult man was spreading and the National Theatre’s Artistic Director, Peter Hall
[1930-], refused to allow him to direct his new play, Human Canon, in the early 1980s, which the author
had specifically conceived for the wide Olivier stage at the venue. The War Plays, a result of various
individual commissions, formed Bond’s work during the mid-1980s. His attempt to direct them at the
Royal Shakespeare Company was disastrous and he left rehearsals before the premiere. This incident led
to Bond’s final break with the establishment and he has since refused to allow his work to premiere in
London at the larger, mainstream theatres. Bond’s subsequent new writing has mostly been performed by
amateur companies and foreign theatres; Paris became the temporary home of his work. He also writes
plays for youth companies and youth audiences: “I make no distinction between writing Lear and a play
for young people. In fact, I love writing for the young. They’re not interested in plays about paying the
mortgage”.
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of determination by the establishment to showcase Bond’s
work in recognition of his status as a major British dramatist. The Sheffield Crucible revived Lear in
2004, the theatre company Headlong produced Restoration in 2006, and the author finally received his
West End debut in 2008 with The Sea, 46 years after his professional debut, although Bond did walk out
during rehearsals and never returned to watch the production. For many years, Bond had refused to grant
permission to UK companies to stage Saved: “My agent says he still gets more requests for that play than
any others. We get a request once a week, but I won’t let them do it in this country now. They will turn it
into a horror show [...] A performance will completely destroy a play.” However, last year, the artistic
director of the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith, Sean Holmes, succeeded in persuading Bond to allow him
to produce the play. Bond was satisfied with the production, (although interestingly several reviewers felt
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the production too reverential and therefore outdated,) and the venue will now be reviving Bond’s The
Chair Plays later this year.
Bond has said that he always knew the path that his work was going to take; that he roughly conceived a
whole series of plays which explored the human condition as a young man, and just started writing.
Bond’s plays are often represented as dark, violent and nihilistic, but underneath the pain there is usually
a glimmer of hope. Even the controversial, Saved, ends with its protagonist, Len, peacefully and
methodically mending a broken chair, an ending which Bond himself described as “almost irresponsibly
optimistic”. Bond himself articulated his viewpoint in a press interview in 2008: “You have to see how
people deal with a crisis, but in the end you cannot despair. If you’re going to despair, stop writing. If my
plays are staged and acted in the way which they are written, what comes across is a colossal affirmation
of life.”
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2. The Works of Edward Bond
Edward Bond has written around 50 plays and adaptations, some of which remain unperformed. He has
also written for television, film and opera. Below is a selection of his theatrical work.
Plays
The Pope's Wedding (1962)
Saved (1964)
Early Morning (1968)
Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968)
Black Mass (1970)
Lear (1971)
The Sea "a comedy" (1973)
Bingo "scenes of money and death" (1973)
The Fool "scenes of bread and love" (1975)
The Woman "scenes of war and freedom" (1978)
The Bundle or New Narrow Road To The Deep North (1977)
The Worlds (1979)
Restoration "a pastorale" (1981)
Summer "a European play" (1982)
Derek (1982)
Human Cannon (1986)
The War Plays:
Red Black and Ignorant (1984)
The Tin Can People (1984)
Great Peace (1985)
Jackets or The Secret Hand (1989)
In the Company of Men (1992)
September (1989)
Olly's prison (1993)
Tuesday (1995)
Coffee "a tragedy" (1996)
At the Inland Sea, "a play for young people" (1995)
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Eleven Vests (1997)
The Crime of the twenty-first Century (1999)
The Children (2000)
Have I None (2000)
Existence (2002)
Born (2006)
The Balancing Act (2003)
People (2005)
The Under Room (2005)
Arcade (2006)
Tune (2007)
Innocence (2008)
A Window (2009)
There Will Be More (2010)
Adaptations
Thomas Middleton: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1965)
Anton Chekhov : Three Sisters (1966)
Bertolt Brecht: Heads (Round Heads and Pick Heads) (1970)
John Webster: The White Devil (1976)
Frank Wedekind: Spring Awakening (1974)
Frank Wedekind: Lulu (1992)
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3. Synopsis
Cast
William Shakespeare: He is in his later years, retired from London.
Old Man: Shakespeare’s gardener.
Old Woman: The Old Man’s wife, she is Shakespeare’s housekeeper.
Son: The Old Man and Woman’s son. He leads the rebellion against Combe.
William Combe: Landowner and magistrate. He proposes the Welcombe Enclosure.
Judith: Shakespeare’s daughter.
Young Woman: A beggar.
Ben Jonson: Playwright, Shakespeare’s contemporary/rival.
Wally, Jerome and John: Farm labourers.
2nd Old Woman: Shakespeare’s wife, Judith’s mother.
Synopsis
Bingo takes place in Warwickshire over several months, stretching from 1615 to 1616.
Scene 1: Garden.
Shakespeare is sat in his garden reading with the Old Man next to him, trimming the hedge, when a
Young Woman arrives to beg. As Shakespeare goes into the house to fetch his purse, the Old Man hides
the Young Woman in the back garden where he plans to have sex with her. Seizing the opportunity to do
so, the Old Man exits into the back garden leaving Shakespeare alone. The Old Woman attempts to gauge
Shakespeare’s intentions with regards to Combe’s proposed land enclosure and warns him that it will ruin
the livelihoods of impoverished local families. Combe arrives to convince Shakespeare to sign a contract
indicating that he will neither oppose nor interfere with the enclosure, in exchange for the security of his
own land. Shakespeare states his terms and agrees to remain impartial in any ensuing struggles over the
enclosures. The Old Man enters dishevelled but excited followed by his son, who has discovered him with
the Young Woman. The Son admonishes the Old Man for his sexual misconduct. As a local magistrate,
Combe interrogates the Young Woman who explains that she is passing through Warwickshire en route to
her auntie in Bristol due to the death of her family in Coventry. Combe however, disbelieves her storysentencing her to be whipped for vagrancy and prostitution.
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Scene 2: Garden, six months later.
The scene opens with the Old Woman telling Judith about her husband's mental health and his misfortune
with the press gang. Shakespeare and Judith converse in the garden but it becomes clear that their
relationship is a curt one, with Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife also in question. Later,
Shakespeare and the Old Man are in the garden when the Young Woman returns. She is visibly suffering:
still shaking from the flogging, and physically destroyed having been living in burned out barns all winter,
supported by the Old Man. Shakespeare tells Judith to give the woman food and old clothing which
belonged to his wife, but Judith refuses. The Young Woman hides in the orchard when Combe arrives to
give Shakespeare the contract, which he signs. Judith tells Combe that the woman has returned; resulting
in the dispatch of Combe’s men to arrest her. Initially, Judith is angry at her father for tolerating the
Young Woman and Old Man’s misconduct and his lack of sympathy for the local people. However, she
soon feels both responsible and guilty at being the cause of the woman's punishment, and regrets turning
her in. The Old Man breaks down crying because he knows that the woman will be executed for arson.
Patrick Stewart in rehearsals for Bingo
Scene 3: Hill, on a pleasant warm day.
Hanging on a gibbet onstage is the body of the Young Woman who has been executed for setting fire to
barns. Shakespeare sits alone and silent when a pair of local labourers enter eating their lunch, they are
joined by the Son and Wally. The locals discuss the hanging and the Young Woman’s crimes, all the while
making thinly veiled comments about Shakespeare, prompting him to stand and exit the stage. The Son
and Wally become engrossed by the Young Woman’s body and become frenzied as they are overwhelmed
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by religious fervour. Judith enters and witnesses this, before being subjected to scathing judgments on her
father by the Son. When the Son and Wally exit, Shakespeare re-enters and recalls the violent scene of a
bear-baiting that took place in London near the theatre. He is clearly moved by the death of the Young
Woman and seems to be in despair at the suffering in the world. Judith herself is upset at the growing
sense of distance between Shakespeare and his family. She claims that Shakespeare treats herself and
her mother “...as enemies”. The Old Woman brings news of the arrival of a gentleman from London, and
despite her best intentions is unable to placate the difficult sentiments of Shakespeare and his daughter.
Richard McCabe as Ben Jonson in rehearsals
Scene 4: The Golden Cross, a tavern.
It is revealed that Ben Jonson is the gentleman who has arrived from London. Shakespeare and Jonson
are sitting in the tavern drinking, Jonson has come with the news that the Globe Theatre has burned
down. Jonson asks Shakespeare what he has been writing, and the two discuss their lives and literature.
Their conversation is cynical, and their attitude towards writing is unglamorous: Jonson in particular
displays his insecurities as a writer. Hs also recounts a life of violence compared with Shakespeare's
quiet existence in the countryside. As the two get increasingly drunk, the Son and the farm labourers
enter. They had been destroying Combe’s enclosure fences and ditches under the cover of darkness, when
they encountered defensive resistance from Combe’s men. The Son and the labourers see themselves as
religious soldiers against the immoral acts of "...rich thieves plunderin' the earth". Combe enters the
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Tavern in order to warn and confront them, claiming that he represents progress and pragmatic realism.
As Combe exits, the Son and the labourers vow to redouble their efforts to destroy his enclosures.
Scene 5: Open Space, it has been snowing heavily.
Shakespeare is walking home from the tavern when he encounters the Old man who is in an obvious state
of excitement. He has been playing in the fresh snow, building a snowman and throwing snowballs.
During Shakespeare’s exchange with the Old Man, several dark figures run across the stage. Judith
enters and castigates Shakespeare for neglecting her mother, his wife. Shakespeare responds by telling
her that after temporarily abandoning her mother, he attempted to earn Judith’s love by spending large
sums of money on her. Not only has he failed to win her love, but Shakespeare considers his actions to be
responsible for her vulgar materialism. This soured relationship between father and daughter seems to be
irrevocable and Judith leaves him to the cold. As Shakespeare sits alone in the snow, several more dark
figures run by backstage, and a gunshot is heard. The Old Woman enters to take Shakespeare home.
Scene 6: Bedroom
Shakespeare is in bed, delirious and repeating the phrase, “Was anything done” as the Old Woman looks
on, checking on his fragile state. From outside the door we hear Judith calling for Shakespeare, her
mother is with her and they knock and scratch at the door calling to be let in. Shakespeare refuses to
respond to Judith and her mother, making them increasingly vehement and hysterical, demanding to be
let in. Finally, Shakespeare slips his will underneath the door which succeeds in placating them, but not
before Judith denounces, “We’ll never speak to him again. He’ll learn when it’s too late.” The Son enters
the room and after lying to his mother, confesses to Shakespeare that he shot his father, the Old Man,
during a scuffle with Combe’s men. Combe himself enters, upholding his magisterial duty and intending
to solve the mystery of the Old Man’s murder. At this, the Son hypocritically accuses Combe of bearing
the responsibility for his father’s death. As the two argue, neither notice Shakespeare ingesting the
poison pills that he had taken from Jonson. Combe and the Son finally leave, with matters unresolved and
the Son even absolving himself from the murder of his father. Both Combe and the Son are equally
unaware that Shakespeare is slowly dying. Judith enters to discover her father fallen onto the floor,
twitching and jerking. Paying little care to her dying father, she ransacks the room for a second will as
the funeral bell tolls and Shakespeare finally succumbs to the poison.
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4. Cast and Creative Team
Cast
Judith
Catherine Cusack
Wally
Tom Godwin
Old Woman
Ellie Haddington
Joan/Second Old Woman
Joanne Howarth
Jerome
Kieron Jecchinis
William Combe
Matthew Marsh
Ben Jonson
Richard McCabe
Old Man
John McEnery
Son
Alex Price
William Shakespeare
Patrick Stewart
Young Woman
Michelle Tate
Creative Team
Direction
Angus Jackson
Design
Robert Innes Hopkins
Associate Design
Mark Simmonds
Light
Tim Mitchell
Music
Stephen Warbeck
Sound
Ian Dickinson for Autograph
Casting
Gabrielle Dawes CDG
Dialect
Majella Hurley
Voice
Alan Woodhouse
Jerwood Assistant Director
Anthony Lau
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5. Bingo:
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death
Bingo premiered on 14th November, 1973 at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter. Bob Peck [1945-1999]
played the leading role of Shakespeare and John Gielgud [1904-2000] took over when the play opened at
the Royal Court in London the following year. The reviews were predictably mixed. Many took offence at
Bond denigrating England’s most famous genius, accusing the author of making presumptions about the
state of Shakespeare’s mental health without any historical evidence. Some critics praised the play as a
step forward for Bond, where the onstage violence that had alienated many audience members in Saved
was now represented in the words of the characters, and was consequentially more powerful. Others felt
that after the less-hysterical, and therefore more watchable, The Sea, Bond had relapsed back into
tedious despair.
Patrick Stewart as Shakespeare and Richard McCabe as Ben Johnson
In a press interview, Bond explained why he had chosen Bingo as a title for the play: “Art has very
practical consequences. Most ‘cultural appreciation’ ignores this and is no more relevant than a game of
Bingo and less honest.” This quote encapsulates Bond’s reason for writing. Many of Bond’s socio-political
contemporaries [see chapter 8] say that theatre should reflect the world, provoke the audience into
examining their lives, but Bond believes that theatre - his theatre - has the power to actually force a
change in society. It’s this belief that has led the writer to remove himself from commercial theatre,
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drawing a distinction between theatre, which is for entertainment, and drama, which can change the
world. Bond describes venues like the National Theatre and the RSC as ‘show shops’ creating ‘shop
shows’; producing an endless line of entertainments along a fixed model, designed ultimately to pleasure
an audience through a series of effects. He admires the Ancient Greeks and Shakespeare as tackling the
larger issues in society and believes only extreme characters, situations and events are effective in
communicating the messages which need to be heard.
Bingo director Angus Jackson in rehearsals
In Bingo, Bond tries to reconcile the historical facts about Shakespeare as a landowner who protects his
own wealth to the detriment of the local peasants, with the author who arguably understood and
articulated the human condition more than any other. (He cites Shakespeare’s, King Lear, a play he had
previously re-imagined a year earlier in Lear, as articulating radical social messages about class,
politics, and homelessness, but argued that the writer could only communicate those controversial ideas
by putting them in the mouth of a character who was seen to be mad.) Bond’s conclusion is that the only
outcome for Shakespeare’s hypocrisy would be despair, passivity and ultimately suicide: “Of course, I
can’t insist that my description of Shakespeare’s death is true. I’m like a man who looks down from a
bridge at the place where an accident has happened. The road is wet, there’s a skid mark, the car’s
wrecked, and dead man lies by the road in a pool of blood. I can only put the various things together and
say what probably happened.” Many critics have argued however that there is absolutely no evidence that
Shakespeare was depressed in his final years and therefore Bond’s whole thesis is irrelevant. However,
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the author rebuts this by clarifying that he isn’t actually interested in a historically accurate exploration
of Shakespeare’s biography at all, and the character of Shakespeare in the play simply represents the
relationship between any writer and his society.
The subtitle of the play is: ‘Scenes of Money and Death’ as it explores Bond’s political conviction that the
central problem in our society is commercialism. Shakespeare’s wrestle between his conscience and his
personal well-being is a consequence of capitalism, and Shakespeare’s battle is symbolic of the
fundamental conflict society experiences every day: “A consumer society depends on its members being
avaricious, ostentatious, gluttonous, envious, wasteful, selfish and inhuman. Officially we teach morality
but if we all became ‘good’ the economy would collapse. Affluent people can’t afford ten
commandments.” Bond’s solution to this problem is outlined in his preface to the play. He explains that
the only way that society can solve its problems is by introducing a new culture, and the concept of that
new culture already exists; democracy. He argues that what we currently classify as democracy isn’t
democracy at all because capitalism forces a class system on society which means nobody is truly free.
So, although many critics have described Bingo as too bleak and despairing, Bond’s stubborn faith in
humanity exists in his belief that society can be saved by remodelling the system we live by. Bond’s recent
emphasis on writing for a younger audience has been prompted by his belief that it is only through
educating the next generation that a change is possible, intercepting them before they become too reliant
on the current structure that they can no longer see other options. At the end of Bingo, Shakespeare asks
himself: “Was anything done?” Recently, an interviewer put the same question to Bond himself: “Not
enough. Not enough. [...] But I feel I’ve only just begun to understand the possibilities of drama. All I can
do is write the best plays I can and keep redescribing reality as I see it.”
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6. Edward Bond’s William Shakespeare
Very little is known about William Shakespeare’s life and no portraits of the author survive which have
been proven authentic (despite the fact that many believe, wrongly, that the famous Chandos painting,
used widely as the definitive image of the author, has been authenticated). Whilst scholars have invested
considerable time and energy trying to locate more facts over the last four centuries, artists have spent
an equal amount of time making creative assumptions based on his work. It is known that Shakespeare
was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1564 into a middle-class family. It is assumed that the author
studied at the local grammar school and would have received a relatively strong education for a nonaristocrat, including studying Latin. Shakespeare married the 26 year old Anne Hathaway [1555-1623]
when he was aged 18. Their first child (Susanna) was born six months later and the couple went on to
have twins (Hamnet and Judith); the boy died as a child. There are no records of Shakespeare’s life
between 1585 (when the twins are recorded as being baptised) and 1592 (when a source comments on
his presence in London), and this period is known as ‘the lost years’. By 1592, Shakespeare was a writer
in London and, by 1594, a part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a theatre company named after
their aristocratic supporter. The company built the Globe theatre to house their work in 1599, (the venue
was destroyed by fire in 1613 and rebuilt a year later). The company’s success continued to grow and in
1603 they were adopted by the new monarch, James I [1566-1625], and changed their name to The
King’s Men. Shakespeare evidently became a rich man through his plays and business investments during
his time in London, as records show that he bought a property in Blackfriars, and New Place, the secondlargest house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where Bingo is set. The writer returned to his native Warwickshire
in his later years, and it was here that he died in 1616.
Edward Bond acknowledges Shakespeare’s influence on his work, which is at its most evident in Bingo
and Lear (1971). He has however criticised the playwright (as he does the Ancient Greek playwrights)
for being unable to dramatically integrate the problems we have as human individuals with the problems
we have in our society: “Even Shakespeare, for all his greatness, can’t always do that.” In Bingo however,
the playwright draws directly on the life of the Bard as source material, he explains the historical crux
which is at the centre of his play: “[Shakespeare]... could either side with the landowners or with the poor
who would lose their land and livelihood. He sided with the landowners. They gave him a guarantee
against loss – and this is not a neutral document because it implies that should the people fighting the
enclosures come to him for help he would refuse it. Well, the town did write to him for help and he did
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nothing.” Bond made several changes to the known facts of Shakespeare’s life in order to create the
drama he was interested in exploring. He outlines these in his introduction to the play and explains he
made them for dramatic convenience. Bingo doesn’t feature the author’s first daughter, Susanna, instead
her function in Shakespeare’s life (at least, as Bond imagines it) is given to the character of the old
woman, a servant of Shakespeare, whose son is a victim of enclosure. This was so Bond had a character
onstage that could provide a link between Shakespeare’s personal home life and the political impact of
his decisions on local society. Bond also explains that the character of William Coombe actually
represents several men who were involved in the enclosures. He also altered the date of Shakespeare’s
theatre burning down from 1613 to 1616 in order to condense and concentrate the events of
Shakespeare’s life. Bond explains the relation between the historical facts and his play: “It is based on
the material historical facts so far as they’re known, and on psychological truth so far as I know it. [...] I
admit that I’m not really interested in Shakespeare’s true biography in the way a historian might be.”
A painting we believe to be of Shakespeare, by Chandos
Bond’s depiction of Shakespeare’s London, as spoken by the protagonist, is frequently cited for
commendation by critics and audience members. Bond’s trademark violent imagery is at one with the
brutality of Tudor London and is vividly articulated by the character of Shakespeare. He describes
theatregoers as having to pass underneath severed heads on their way into the Globe theatre and “women
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with shopping bags stepping over puddles of blood”. Similarly, the scene between Shakespeare and his
playwriting contemporary, Ben Jonson [1572-1637], is frequently selected as the highlight of Bingo as it
is so evocative. Here again, Bond admits to taking liberties with the truth as it is believed that the poet
Michael Drayton [1563-1631] was also present at this final drinking binge between the two men. We
have a notion of the historical relationship between the two playwrights through records and because
Jonson wrote several times about Shakespeare, both during his lifetime and post-humorously. The Lord
Chamberlain’s Men produced several of Jonson’s plays and it is known that Shakespeare acted in at least
one of them. The relationship is often portrayed as that of rivalry; one story is that when Jonson was told
by an actor that Shakespeare never crossed out a line that he wrote because his first draft was always so
perfect, the playwright replied: “Would that he had blotted [crossed out] a thousand.” As portrayed in
Bingo, a contemporary of Jonson’s noted that the two playwrights did drink together in the Mermaid
Tavern and engage in debates. The source suggests that the learned classicist Jonson would have been
frustrated by the relatively-uneducated Shakespeare’s ability to win these arguments. Despite these
suggestions of animosity however, Jonson contributed a poem to the preface of the publication of
Shakespeare’s first folio after his death.
Patrick Stewart as Shakespeare
Bond’s portrayal of William Shakespeare isn’t historically accurate. He has altered biographical facts
and drawn personal conclusions in order to tell the story he wishes to convey. Indeed, this is not unlike
Shakespeare himself who constantly reinvented historical truth in order to suit his own artistic demands.
Commentator, John Elsom, writing in 1974 shortly after the play debuted concluded: “Bingo is about a
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Shakespeare (not necessarily the Shakespeare); that is, a supreme artist whose talents could not touch
nor alter the society in which he lived, except negatively, by helping the system he hated.”
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7. Land Enclosures
Bingo depicts the later years of Shakespeare’s life when he was a landowner living in Stratford-UponAvon. The writer owned a half share in a lease of tithes in nearby Welcombe. Tithing was a system by
which the peasants paid one tenth of their yearly earnings, either in money or goods, in return for land.
In 1614, William Combe proposed that the land at Welcombe should be enclosed and, despite knowing
the hardship it would cause the peasants who worked and lived there, Shakespeare agreed because his
own income would be guaranteed.
An act of enclosure meant that areas of common land previously used by all, usually for arable farming
(the growing of crops), were divided and hedged or fenced off, usually to allow livestock to graze on the
land. Prior to this, lands were shared between landowners, who raised crops, and villagers, who grazed
their livestock when crops were not being grown. (We are now so used to the concept of private
ownership that it is difficult to imagine the concept of large areas of common land. Perhaps a useful idea
is to imagine the act of enclosure as the equivalent of somebody in 2012 suddenly claiming an area of
public land - such as a local park - for themselves and fencing it off.) During the Tudor period (14851603) – Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616 - the rate at which land was being enclosed
rose rapidly. This was mostly due to a rise in profitability of wool as foreign demand increased. Sheep
herding also required fewer labourers than crops so the profit margin was even greater. By the 1800s,
remaining unenclosed common land was mostly located in mountainous areas which were difficult to
farm, and relatively small parts of the lowlands such as village greens.
Enclosure had a great impact on the lives of the British people, particularly the peasants. Land was often
taken by force as the wealthy landowners simply drew up deeds granting themselves the territory. (Bond
demonstrates William Combe doing this in Bingo.) Some historians estimate that 3 out of 4 tenant
farmers [farmers who rented their land as opposed to owning it] had their land removed during the late
medieval period. As the nature of the land switched, labourers were made unemployed and many lost
their homes, either when they were knocked down during the enclosure or subsequently through rent
arrears. Many rural labourers were forced to travel to find work and great numbers were displaced, as
represented by the Young Woman in Bingo. Tudor law stated that if someone lost their home then they
were classified as a vagrant and, with no state support, it was likely that the individual would have to
resort to crime to provide for themselves.
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The church recognised the negative impact that enclosures were having in the community and denounced
the procedure. The Government attempted to intervene by introducing anti-enclosure legislation in 1489
and several more acts over the following years. Initially, these laws didn’t ban enclosure, they simply
fined the perpetrators. They were ultimately ineffectual however as the Government couldn’t keep track
of when enclosure occurred. In the second half of the 16th century, revolts began to spread throughout
the country. As Bond depicts, tenants who had been forced from their land began to destroy the hedges
and fences, fighting with the local landowners and authorities. In 1607, the Midland Revolt and Newton
Rebellion occurred in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire (where Shakespeare lived).
The King forced the local authorities to support the gentry, despite the fact that many sided with the
peasants. The Newton Rebellion ended with 50 people dying in battle and the ringleaders of the revolt
being hanged and quartered. Shakespeare wrote King Lear at the same time as this civil unrest occurred
around England and Lear’s comments on the oppression of the working classes and the homeless are
often seen as the writer critiquing the society in which he lived:
“Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?”
Henry VI and As You Like It also mention the enclosures, whilst Coriolanus features grain shortages,
which were a consequence of the practise. It is the juxtaposition of Shakespeare’s social conscious, as
revealed through the voices of his characters, with his passivity in the face of enclosures which Bond
explores in Bingo: “Shakespeare’s plays show this need for sanity and its political expression, justice. But
how did he live? His behaviour as a property-owner made him closer to Goneril than Lear. He supported
and benefitted from the Goneril-society – with its prison, workhouses, whipping, starvation, mutilation,
pulpit-hysteria and all the rest of it.”
The Newton Rebellion was one of the last times in history that the peasants and gentry fought one
another in England. Socialists see enclosure as the moment in history where the underclass lost their
battle for equality against the upper-classes. Many landowners became rich, or significantly increased
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their wealth, as a consequence of enclosure. George Orwell [1903-1950] clarified the socio-political
context of enclosures: “Stop to consider how the so-called owners of land got hold of it. They simply
seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure
of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have
the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own
countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.” It was the great sociopolitical impact of this practise in Britain, and Shakespeare’s small contribution to the distress it caused,
that led Bond to write Bingo [see chapter 5 and 6].
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8. The Royal Court Theatre
The emergence of Edward Bond as a controversial and innovative playwright formed part of a larger
movement within British theatre which centred on the Royal Court Theatre during the 1950s and 60s.
Post-war Britain was a dreary and repressive place to live and there was a feeling amongst the youth that
the country had little to offer them. This was reflected in the nation’s theatre, where the safe drawingroom dramas of Terence Rattigan [1911-1977] and Noel Coward [1899-1973], which depicted middleclass dilemmas, still dominated the West End. Then, in 1956, a play called Look Back in Anger
premiered and altered the course of British drama.
The Royal Court was the home of the newly established English Stage Company, led by George Devine
[1910-1966] and Tony Richardson [1928-1999]. Their aim was to discover new plays which would not
merely entertain but make sense of the world; a theatre which could educate and liberate. Over the next
decade, the Royal Court was responsible for launching the careers of many writers who pushed against
the boundaries of taste, form and theme, including Bond, Wesker [1932-], Osborne [1929-1994], Jellicoe
[1927-], N.F. Simpson [1919-2011], Arden [1930-], as well as premiering new plays by Brecht [18981956], Pinter [1930-2008], Beckett [1906-1989] and Ionesco [1909-1994]. Devine later commented: “I
wanted to change the attitude of the public towards the theatre. All I did was to change the attitude of
the theatre towards the audience”. Devine championed the right to fail, believing that exciting art was
only produced when the creator felt safe enough to experiment, even if that meant the occasional flop.
The Royal Court became known as the leading UK venue for new writing, an artistic policy it still heralds
today.
Bond’s Contemporaries
John Osborne
The venue’s success wasn’t straight forward however. Devine’s first advertisement in the press requesting
new plays only revealed one work of any interest from amongst the 750 submissions received. This was
the first play by an unknown actor turned writer, John Osborne. The play was Look Back in Anger. The
play explored the life of Jimmy Porter, a bored and frustrated young man, living in a dilapidated
Leicestershire flat with his friend, Cliff, and girlfriend, Alison. Osborne based the play on his own
experience of living in similar conditions whilst working as an actor in regional theatre. The play wasn’t
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particularly revolutionary in form, a standard three-act drama, but the strength of Osborne’s anti-hero’s
voice struck the audience: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left.” The play wasn’t an overnight
success, many contemporary critics were irritated by the characters’ vitriol, but the most influential
newspaper reviewer of the period, Kenneth Tynan [1927-1980], gave it an outstanding write-up and the
BBC sealed the play’s fate by broadcasting an excerpt. Whilst the premiere of Look Back in Anger is now
seen as a turning point in British drama, the production was only a part in a series of plays which
transformed the genre. It was the media who reported that a revolution in theatre was taking place,
focusing on the succession of new writers emerging from the Royal Court. The venue’s press officer
assisted by unwittingly giving the movement a name; when asked to describe Osborne’s work (which he
disliked), he could only describe him as “an angry young man.” The phrase became a useful tagline for the
press when discussing the new movement of kitchen sink dramas which explored British working class
lives, usually in domestic settings, with gritty social realism. Osborne went on to write several more
successful plays - The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot
for Me (1965) – before bad reviews and a stormy personal life led to a decline in his work.
John Osborne
Arnold Wesker
Another playwright to emerge from the Royal Court’s writers group was a working class Jew from
London’s East End, Arnold Wesker. His first work, The Kitchen (1957), represented Wesker’s experience
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of working in a hotel kitchen, and explored cheap immigrant labour. It belongs to the ‘work play’ genre
which became popular in British theatre, depicting real work on stage. Wesker’s most enduring work is a
trilogy of plays – Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots, and I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1958) - about an
East End Jewish family between 1936 and 1956. Wesker is often viewed as a naturalistic writer for his
accurate and beautiful portrayals of normal people in every day scenarios, but a closer examination of his
work reveals a leaning towards romantic expressionism.
John Arden
John Arden was another graduate from the Royal Court school, whose socialist plays caused controversy
and disgust. His first play, Live Like Pigs (1958), centred on a group of travellers forced to live in
council accommodation. His second hit, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), portrayed a group of British
soldiers deserting their regiment because of the colonial atrocities they have committed abroad. Arden
originally wrote the play in response to British troops in Cyprus in the 1950s but it remains current as
long as the British army is involved in any overseas action. Whilst these two plays are now considered
20th century classics, Arden’s work was never as commercially successful as some of the other Royal
Court writers, and his name became synonymous with box office losses at the venue.
John Arden
All these Royal Court alumni suffered a similar fate to Edward Bond and were neglected by the
theatrical establishment in their later careers, usually due to arguments which centred on the lack of
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artistic control they felt as artists. Arden felt increasingly marginalised by the Royal Court as his plays
made financial losses. He eventually retreated to rural Ireland in the 1970s following a row with the
RSC which made front page news when he picketed his own play, The Island of the Mighty, because he
felt he wasn’t allowed time to rewrite during preview performances. Arnold Wesker developed a
reputation for being difficult after suing the RSC for failing to produce a play, The Journalist, which
they’d commissioned. (The writer was especially frustrated because the National Theatre had done the
same thing with a different play the year before). He moved to Wales and, like Bond and Arden, now
writes mainly for community and young people’s theatre. Osborne remained in London and, unlike the
others, received a sustainable amount of royalties. However, as his plays got increasingly negative
reviews, and his rocky personal life impacted on his health and finances, he too became disillusioned by
the state of British theatre. In recent years, Bond, Osborne, Wesker and Arden have enjoyed a reemergence, with mainstream revivals of their most famous plays at the National Theatre, Lyric
Hammersmith, and Donmar Warehouse. Last year, 46 years after George Devine left as Artistic Director,
the Royal Court produced a sell-out revival of Wesker’s Chicken Soup without Barley. The current artistic
director, Dominic Cooke [1966-], was asked to assess Wesker’s neglect: “I think that what has happened
to his career is very striking... The theatre does tend to move forward very quickly, tastes change. He was
part of a theatre revolution, and there’s a saying that nothing tastes so stale as the revolution of the day
before yesterday.”
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9. Heightened Text: A Drama Exercise
The text of Bingo, like many of Bond’s plays, is written in a heightened form. It is more poetic and
theatrical than everyday speech. Both audiences and actors can be wary of this type of writing, but
professional theatre directors use certain exercises to assist the actor in approaching heightened text,
which in turn hopefully assists the audience in understanding the dialogue in performance. Below is an
example of the kind of exercises which an actor might use in rehearsal. It can be applied to any
heightened text, such as Bond or Shakespeare.
Bingo. Scene Five.
Shakespeare:
The door’s opened, I drank too much, I must be calm. Don’t fall about in front of
them. Why did I drink all that? Fool! Fool! At my age... Why not? I am a fool.
Why did I come back here? I wanted to meet some god by the river. Ask him
questions. See his mouth open and the lips move. Hear simple things that move
mountains and stop the blood before it hits the earth. Stop it so there’s time to
think. I was wrong to come – mistakes, mistakes. But I can’t go back. That hate,
anger –
1. Start by speaking the speech aloud whilst walking around the room.
2. Now, pay particular attention to the punctuation. A good writer will always have carefully
considered their choice of punctuation and it is a clue to how they imagined the speech being
delivered.
- Walk again speaking aloud.
- Each time you arrive at a full stop (or question mark, exclamation mark or colon), stop walking,
pause speaking, and turn to face another direction and start the next sentence as you begin
walking again.
- Each time you arrive at a comma, turn to face the other direction, take a breath and continue
walking.
- (The difference between reaching the end of a sentence and reaching a comma should be that the
latter elicits less of a physical and vocal pause.)
3. Walk again speaking the text aloud, but only articulating the consonants. Ignore all vowels. You
will need to slow down your rate of speaking in order to ensure you really hit each consonant
clearly.
p en
n ed
d , I drank
ch,
st b e calm
lm.
The
dr nk too much
ch I must
lm
Th d oorr’ss op
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4. Reverse this process and now only articulate the vowels. Where a vowel can be spoken in several
different ways (i.e. the syllable ‘o’ is pronounced ‘or’ in the word ‘door’, versus ‘o’ in ‘opened)
sound it the way it should be spoken in the context of that particular word. It helps to say the
whole word in your head.
Thee doo
oor’s
ank too
oo mu
uch, I mu
u st bee ca
a lm.
oo o peeneed, I dra
5. Place a finger inside the side of your mouth, between your upper and lower teeth. Speak the text
aloud without biting (clamping) your finger with your jaw, whilst trying to make the text as clear
as possible. In order to achieve this, you will need to over-articulate and speak slower than in
everyday life.
6. You have now examined the text from a vocal viewpoint. Speak the text aloud whilst standing
still. You should discover that you are automatically articulating much more clearly than before
you started these exercises and the text is more pleasant to listen to.
However, it is not enough for an actor to speak heightened text beautifully. It is crucial that they also
understand what their character is thinking and feeling in order to communicate this to the audience.
A. Start by looking up any words or references in a dictionary which you are not familiar with.
B. Who the character is speaking to in the speech? In this example, Shakespeare is predominantly
alone on stage. Is he speaking directly to the audience or to himself? This is a decision for the
actor and director as Bond doesn’t specify in the play text.
C. Look at the practical context of the speech in the play / scene as given by the playwright. Bond
specifies in the stage directions at the beginning of Scene 5 that Shakespeare is drunk and that it
has been snowing. Shakespeare doesn’t have a coat so he must be cold. It is also night-time. All
these details will affect how the actor plays the speech.
D. Look at the emotional context of the speech within the play / scene. Shakespeare is angry and
frustrated and will commit suicide in the next scene. Again, this gives the actor a clue as to the
emotions he/she should be aiming to reproduce onstage.
E. Characters speak in a series of thoughts, just as people do in the real world. Divide the speech up
into individual thoughts on the page by putting a forward slash to indicate a thought-change. This
helps break the text into more manageable chunks. Sometimes it is the actor’s choice as to
whether something is a thought-change or not and could be argued either way, so there isn’t
definite right or wrong. Looking at the writer’s choice of punctuation often provides a clue to how
they intended the thoughts to be broken down.
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Shakespeare:
Shakespeare
The door’s opened,/ I drank too much,/ I must be calm. Don’t fall about in front of
them. / Why did I drink all that? / Fool! / Fool! / At my age... / Why not? / I am a
fool. / Why did I come back here? / I wanted to meet some god by the river. / Ask
him questions. / See his mouth open and the lips move. / Hear simple things that
move mountains and stop the blood before it hits the earth. / Stop it so there’s time
to think. / I was wrong to come – mistakes, mistakes. / But I can’t go back. / That
hate, anger –
By combining these vocal and mental/emotional exercises, an actor will be begin to make
sense of the speech both for themselves and for the audience.
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10.
10. Bibliography
Books
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro (Faber and Faber: 2006)
Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century by Richard Eyre and Nicholas
Wright (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC: 2000)
Plays One: Waters of Babylon, When Is a Door..., Live Like Pigs, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, Happy
Haven by John Arden (Methuen: 2004)
Plays One: Look Back in Anger, Epitaph for George Dillon, The World of Paul Slickey, Dejavu by John
Osborne (Faber and Faber: 2006)
In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Wood (BBC Books: 2005)
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre by John Russell Brown (OUP: 1995)
Plays One: Saved, Early Morning, The Pope’s Wedding by Edward Bond (Methuen: 1977)
Plays Two: Lear, The Sea, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Black Mass, Passion by Edward Bond
(Methuen: 1978)
Plays Three: Bingo, The Fool, The Woman, Stone by Edward Bond (Methuen: 1987)
Plays Four: The Worlds, Activist Papers, Restoration, Summer by Edward Bond (Methuen: 1992)
Royal Court Theatre Inside Out by Ruth Young and Emily McLaughlin (Oberon: 2007)
The Wesker Trilogy by Arnold Wesker (Methuen: 2001)
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Internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/jan/03/theatre
http://www.enotes.com/edward-bond-criticism/bond-edward-vol-6
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/apr/25/bingo-chichester-review
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/7635310/Bingo-at-Chichesters-MinervaTheatre-review.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/bingo-scenes-of--money-anddeath-minerva-theatre-chichester-1955033.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo (play)
http://www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/birmingham-culture/theatre-inbirmingham/2009/10/21/dramatist-edward-bond-is-still-going-to-extremes-65233-24983934/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bond
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/sep/09/theatre.stage
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/bond_transcript.shtml
http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/mmlib/includes/ajax/textile.preview.php?year=1960&title=1960s
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/mar/06/comedy1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/apr/29/theatre.biography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/jan/03/theatre.stage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/may/22/arnold-wesker-interview
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