It is impossible to discuss the character and evolution of modern British theater without reference to Edward Bond. More than any playwright of his generation (who grew up in the war), he was interested in violence.
“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about etiquette,” she once said. The play Saved (1965), which made a name for itself both at home and abroad, contains one of the most famous scenes of the post-war drama. In this film, a group of working-class young men physically abuse and (imitatively but gruesomely) stone to death an unseen baby in a stroller, whose own father is one of the criminals.
Like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which premiered at the Royal Palace in 1956, it caused national shockwaves and heralded a generation willing to confront contemporary life with an openness that had hitherto been missing. Gone, too, is the theatrically seductive rhetoric that characterized Osborne’s or Pinter’s work. It’s hard to imagine the explosion of emotional drama in the 1990s, particularly the work of Sarah Kane, without her example.
In fact, the outrage over Saved (1965) and Early Morning (1968) brought the age-old issue of stage censorship to a head. Laurence Olivier took to the stand to defend Saved after the Lord Chamberlain’s office pressed for proceedings in the Crown Court on the grounds that the play had not been approved for presentation. Many people tried to join the cause, but the author himself was denied entry. The theater lost this battle, but the debate flared up in Parliament and work began on a bill to take theaters from state control. Later, the blatantly irreverent Early Morning, which showed Queen Victoria falling in love with Florence Nightingale and squeezing into her hand like a cannibal, was refused a license.
This was the first outright banning of a play in the 20th century, bypassing the loophole of a ‘club’ (members-only) performance. The show continued with a dress rehearsal; a disdain for the authorities but a rehearsal that did not lead to an investigation. The 1968 Theaters Act was passed and the situation changed.
So we owe Bond a lasting debt of gratitude. And this was just the beginning of his writing career (he wrote more than 50 plays) until the mid-2010s. Still, it’s entirely possible to be an avid theatergoer for the last 30 years and have barely seen any of his work; this is a testament to his increasingly isolated position, respected but existing almost in a vacuum.
It is one of the most glaring anomalies of British theatre, that a playwright should remain so sidelined despite being regarded as one of the most important and influential writers of his time. It could be argued that after helping to abolish state censorship, he went on to dismantle his own professional career. He opposed the subsidized sector’s major new-authored theatres. The RSC produced the apocalyptic trilogy The War Plays (1985), but as director he denounced the production and the institution after abandoning rehearsals.
“The men who run the National and the RSC, I call them the floating dead,” he railed. He hated the Royal Court’s 1984 revival of Saved (directed by Danny Boyle); then artistic director Max Stafford-Clark described him as “the most difficult person I’ve ever worked with”. Turning his back on subsidized mainstream stages, Bond’s new works in the 21st century were often staged in Birmingham, by a theater company in training called Big Brum, or abroad, particularly in France.
He always felt that the theater had abandoned him. “They got rid of the Lord Chamberlain, but they got rid of me too,” he told me in 2011. We met during rehearsals for the revival of Saved in London for the first time in nearly 30 years (at the Lyric, Hammersmith). This was a production that reaffirmed the visceral impact of that satire scene, as well as the brutality lurking in low-level domestic exchanges; As original director Bill Gaskill noted, perhaps the most disturbing of all scenes is the one where the baby cries at home. To be ignored for a small eternity.
Bond saw a continuity between wartime violence and the inherently violent functioning of society in peacetime. He argued that people are not naturally aggressive or cruel, but are made so by the social structures they inherit; It was the duty of the drama to show us this disturbing truth. And accordingly, most theaters have refrained from doing so.
Bond’s bracing theoretical writings, his bursts of aphorism (“The so-called End of History is actually the Disappearance of the Future”), survive usefully; These attest to the integrity of his work, but they also explain the ideological tendency that means he sees all social relations in the same comforting light. His later plays invited audiences to a dinner of horror: Coffee (written in 1995) was inspired by the Einsatzgruppen wartime massacres of Jews in the Babi Yar valley. In Inland Sea (1996) forced concentration camp victims into the suburban bedroom of a history-involved schoolboy. Her last play, Dea, which alludes to Medea, was an invocation of rape and bloody brutality performed unconventionally at Sutton in 2016; So much so that, to some, it was like a parody of itself.
Yet his best work can be unpredictable, his dialogue heavy-handed, and his stage imagination gloriously unbridled. Lear (1971) was a brilliant, brutal and modern rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy. And while I was hugely impressed by Jonathan Kent’s revival of The Sea (a black comedy set in Victorian East Anglia), one optimistic streak stuck out. “In the end all destruction is insignificant and in the end life laughs at death.”
Maybe Bond’s tricks will have the last laugh. The vision of a civilized society along devastating fault lines now seems more prescient than ever. The verdict on scene censorship has already been made, but I guess the jury is still out on the full scope of Bond’s achievements.