by The battle to remove censorship from the British stage was mainly fought in the mid-1960s. The plays of Edward Bond, one of the most important British playwrights of the 20th century, who died at the age of 89, were an essential part of that story and struggle.
Bond submitted plays to the English Stage Company recently founded by George Devine at the Royal Court in 1958 and, as a result, was invited to join the theatre’s Writers’ Group. His first stage play, The Pope’s Wedding, was given in an unadorned performance on 9 December 1962, and Devine then commissioned a new play, which Bond submitted in September 1964.
That play, Saved, was presented privately to members of the English Stage Society in November 1965 after the lord chamberlain – the official censor into whose office all new theater plays had to be submitted – demanded cuts in the text. The play was the most controversial of its day, not only because of the blatant sexual swaggering and dialogue, but because of a scene in which a child is stoned to death in a pram.
Periods of middle-class decency in contemporary theater had already been given vicious vignettes in the work of David Rudkin and Joe Orton, but this was something else. There was trouble in the theatre, and in the reviews, and a visit from the police. The theater was dragged to court after an alleged minor breach of club licensing laws, and many prominent witnesses, including Laurence Olivier, spoke in favor of the play. Penelope Gilliatt wrote in the Observer that the play was about brutality, not brutality in itself: “The most painful thing about Saved is that the characters who do not listen to the desperate voices of others are in despair because of lack of . listener themselves.”
Bond’s next drama, Early Morning, was banned outright. It was a surreal fantasy, in which Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale were depicted as lesbian lovers, two conjoined twin princes, and cannibalism in heaven. Again, the vice squad paid a call, performances were canceled and a private dress rehearsal was arranged for the critics in April 1968.
By this time the theaters bill was on its way through the House of Commons, becoming law in September. Plays were finally removed from the control of the lord chamberlain, who had censored the nation’s entertainment since 1737.
Devine was succeeded by William Gaskill, the Court’s artistic director, who in 1969 staged a Bond season that established his reputation in Britain and abroad, during his tours of Belgrade and eastern Europe. Saved was awarded 14 productions in West Germany and opened to acclaim in the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Czechoslovakia and the US.
This period was challenging at the Royal Court, and the experience showed everyone who worked there throughout their lives, especially Bond and Gaskill. Bond was recognized as the bearer of Brecht’s legacy in the depth of his writing and the uncompromising artistic vision of his scenes and stage pictures.
He wrote many fine plays in the following decade: his Lear (1971) was a stately, pitiless rewriting of Shakespeare, with Harry Andrews scaling a giant wall of full-stage at the end; Bingo (1973) and The Fool (1975) drew chilling portraits of English writers – Shakespeare (played by John Gielgud at Court – and Patrick Stewart in the 2010 Chichester revival) and country poet John Clare (Tom Courtenay) – at odds. with its societies, driven respectively to suicide and madness; and The Woman (1978), the first new play to appear on the National’s new Olivier stage, a stunning, panoramic survey of Greek myths and mythology.
Bond was born in Holloway, north London, one of four children. His parents were farm workers in East Anglia and came to London looking for work. Bond was evacuated during the second world war, first to Cornwall and later to live with his grandparents near Ely, Cambridgeshire. He attended Crouch End modern secondary school in London in 1946 and left when he was 15. “I did, of course,” he said, “you see, after that I anyone takes you seriously. The adaptation process stops. When you let them send you to grammar school and university, you’re ruined.”
He enjoyed the music hall and impressed Donald Wolfit as Macbeth at the Bedford theater in Camden Town in 1948: “I knew all these people, they were in the newspapers – this was my life. “
After school he worked as a paint mixer, insurance clerk and checker in an aircraft factory before starting his national service in 1953. He was stationed in Vienna and began writing short stories.
When Saved was produced and knowing that he would always work in the theatre, he bought a house on the edge of a small village, Wilbraham, near Cambridge, and lived there happily with his wife, the German Elisabeth Pablé, a writer . , whom he married in 1971 and with whom he collaborated on a new version of Wedekind’s Lulu based on some newly discovered notes and manuscripts in the early 90s.
His early plays were often based on familiar settings and societies, regardless of their setting, but Bond’s later work took on a more resonant, prophetic tone, some of which felt too good. Simply put, according to Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright in Changing Stages, their 2000 account of British theatre, Bond used to ask questions; now he gave answers.
He gained a reputation as a relatively isolated guru, and his later proscriptive epics about the failure of capitalism and state violence were more often performed by amateurs than by major British companies.
The Worlds (1979), for example, was originally produced by amateurs in Newcastle, but its scope was vast, depicting the downfall of a successful business operation fraught with strike action, terrorism, kidnapping and long speeches. In one of these, terrorists define both worlds as one of appearance and one of reality. In the first, she says, there is right and wrong, the law and good manners. In the second, which controls the first, machines and power.
Before entering what he called self-imposed exile from the British theater establishment, Bond wrote the Restoration “Pastoral” (1981) for the Court, an often witty inversion of Restoration comedy, starring Simon Callow as Lord Are, and Summer (1982) for the National, a humorous, modern take on The Tempest set in the sunny Mediterranean.
Bond was a slim, withdrawn man who could be intimidating, but disarmingly gnomish and self-deprecating when he was in the mood. Sympathetic interviewers may be treated to ambiguous attacks on directors such as Sam Mendes – whose 1991 revival of his 1973 comedy The Sea, a beautiful drama of madness and dehumanization in a hated Edwardian seaside town – and Trevor Nunn (he said, turned the National Theater into a “technicolor sewer”, although he never raised his voice and often broke into mischievous chuckling.
Not even the collapse of eastern European socialism could curb the flow of Bond’s writing. “Before, as a socialist writer,” he once told me, “you knew there was a framework, a system to which the play could ultimately refer. But now, the final act problem is back! And I was always a critic of the system first. That’s why I wrote my version of King Lear.”
Recently, you had to go in search of his new work. The Cock Tavern on the Kilburn High Road, north London, had an interesting season of six plays in 2008, with several more produced by Big Brum, an education theater company in the Midlands, between 2012 and 2014.
Jonathan Kent directed a revival of The Sea at the Haymarket, starring David Haig and Eileen Atkins in 2008, and Sean Holmes provided the first London production of Saved for 27 years – still poignant, more relevant than ever – at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 2011.
Following Brecht’s example, Bond abundantly provided his work with additional devices of poems, prefaces and notebooks, but, unlike Brecht, a comparatively omnipotent intellectual giant, and a far superior poet, he was better at always. when he restricted himself to stage dialogue.
He also wrote for films, including the script for Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), set in the Australian outback and starring Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil, and the Nabokov adaptation Laughter in the Dark (1969), as well as adding dialogue for Michelangelo Antonioni’s. Blow-Up (1966) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971).
At his best, he was a true poet of the stage, and he had a huge influence on at least two generations of theater workers after him. Some of the unknown plays of his later post-nuclear apocalyptic period may be ripe for assessment. At least 10 of his earlier plays have a secure place in the national literature and will surely be revived. He is still highly regarded and often performs in France and Germany.
Elisabeth died in 2017.
• Thomas Edward Bond, playwright and director, born 18 July 1934; he died 3 March 2024
