by It is impossible to discuss the character and evolution of modern British theater without reference to Edward Bond. More than any other playwright of his generation – those who grew up in the war – he was drawn to violence.
“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners,” he once declared. In the drama that made his name here and abroad – Saved (1965) – there is one of the most famous scenes in post-war drama. In it a group of young working-class men physically abuse and stone to death (in a simulated but horrific way) an invisible child in his pram, one of the culprits being his own dad.
Like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1956, it caused national shock waves and heralded a generation willing to face contemporary life with a clarity that had been lacking until now. Gone too was the seductive theatrical rhetoric that characterized Osborne’s or Pinter’s work. It’s hard to imagine the explosion of visceral drama in the 1990s – especially the work of Sarah Kane – without her example.
In fact, outrage at Saved (1965) and Early Morning (1968) raised the issue of stage censorship. Laurence Olivier himself took the stand to defend Saved after the Lord Chamberlain’s office prosecuted in the Royal Court, on the grounds that the play was not approved for presentation. So many people tried to attend the court case that the author himself was refused entry. The theater lost that particular battle but the debate began in Parliament, and work began on a bill to remove theaters from state control. Then a license was refused for Early Morning, which showed Queen Victoria in love with Florence Nightingale putting a cannibalistic hand in her hand, among other things.
That was the first complete ban on drama – which broke the loop in the middle of a ‘club’ (members only) performance – in the 20th century. The show went on through a dress rehearsal he attended – a snub to the authorities but no prosecution. The Theaters Act 1968 was passed, the tide had turned.
For that, Bond is eternally grateful. And that was only the beginning of a career in which he wrote in the mid-2010s (he authored more than 50 plays). But it’s entirely possible to be an avid theatergoer for the last 30 years and have barely seen any of his work – a testament to his increasingly remote, respected but almost empty standing.
That a playwright should be regarded as one of the most important and influential of his era and yet be sidelined is one of the most remarkable anomalies of British theatre. It could be argued that he helped dismantle state censorship, that he dismantled his own professional career. He went against the main new writing theaters of the subsidized sector. The RSC commissioned his apocalyptic trilogy The War Plays (1985) but after he quit rehearsals, as director, he disowned the production and then the institution.
“The men who run the National and the CSI – I call them the floating dead,” he said. He hated the 1984 Royal Court revival (directed by Danny Boyle) of Saved; his then artistic director Max Stafford-Clark described him as “the hardest person I’ve ever worked with”. Turning back to the subsidized main stages, in the 21st century Bond’s new work was often found in Birmingham, staged by an educational theater company called Big Brum, or abroad, especially France.
He always felt that he had abandoned the theater. He told me in 2011: “They got rid of the Lord Chamberlain but they got rid of me too.” We met during rehearsals for the first London revival of Saved in nearly 30 years (at the Lyric, Hammersmith). It was a performance that reiterated the poignant impact of that stony scene but also the brutality felt in low-level domestic exchanges – as original director Bill Gaskill noted, perhaps the the most disturbing scene of all is the scene where the child is crying at home. go unheeded for a small eternity.
Bond saw a continuum between the violence compounded during war and the violent workings of society during peacetime. He said that people were not naturally aggressive or violent, but that the social structures they inherited made them so; it was the task of drama to show us that uncomfortable fact. And by extension most theater was unable to do that.
Bond’s theoretical writings, bracing, shell-exploding aphorisms (“What is called the End of History is really the Forerunner of the Future”) remain useful; they confirm the integrity of his work but also explain an ideological tendency which meant that he saw all social relations in the same uncomfortable way. His later plays invited the audience to be full of horror: Coffee (written in 1995) was inspired by the Jews made by the Einsatzgruppen during the war at the port of Babi Yar. At the Inland Sea (1996) concentration camp victims put a schoolboy grappling with history in a suburban bedroom. His last play, Dea, was a reference to Medea – performed off the beaten track, in Sutton, in 2016 in its litany of rape and bloody brutality – so much so that it was like self-parody, according to some.
But his best work could be wildly unpredictable, his flinty speech and gloriously unrestrained stage imagination. Lear (1971) was a brilliant, brutal, modern rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy. And while Jonathan Kent’s revival of The Sea (a dark pageant set in Victorian East Anglia) has largely washed over me, one hopeful line has stuck. “Destruction is small in the end, and in the end life laughs at death.”
Bond dramas may have the last laugh. It now seems that his vision of civil society is more sophisticated than ever along destructive fault lines. The judgment has long since been passed on stage censorship but I think the jury is still out on the full scope of Bond’s achievements.
