Edward Bond
Celebrated dramatist whose plays’ disturbing sex and violence triggered the end of censorship
EDWARD BOND, the playwright and poet, who has died aged 89, was the most controversial of all the new writers in the British post-war dramatic revival.
A moralist whose plays were often morally obscure, a dramatist who wrote in fragments so brief that they defied directors to achieve a coherent dramatic rhythm, and a Marxist who seemed able only to demonstrate what was wrong with the non-marxist world rather than suggest an alternative, Bond became in the 1960s one of the most fashionable discoveries of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court since John Osborne with Look Back in Anger
a decade earlier.
If Bond’s visibility in British cultural life faded over time, he remained a prolific dramatist – with more than 50 plays to his name – and he was accorded respect in continental Europe while remaining much venerated by academics and other playwrights here; his influence was detected most notably in the 1990s in the work of Sarah Kane, another playwright whose earliest work caused outrage.
He was an almost constant thorn in the side of the official stage censor from the start, and his plays – zealously supported by the Royal Court’s director William Gaskill – were as challenging for the ordinary playgoer to enjoy as for the Lord Chamberlain to approve. No other playwright of the dozens discovered by the Royal Court from the 1950s exercised more persistently the so-called “right to fail” with which the English Stage Company would justify its presentation of works of limited interest.
The plays never strongly took the public fancy, probably because they affronted sensibilities in their portrayal of violence and cruelty, defied Aristotle with their truncated scenes, espoused a Brechtian theory that the audience should be kept on the intellectual alert by the dialogue and structure, and avoided attractive characterisation. But the fact that the Royal Court could continue to present such an assertively unpopular author became a credit to the English Stage Company’s policy. It could rise above “market forces”, public taste and censorship.
Indeed it was Bond’s plays which directly led to the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Several of the early plays were so provocative in their representation of sex, violence and the Royal family that they could only be acted in what were known as club conditions, to which the censor traditionally turned a blind eye. This was the means deployed to present the uncompromising Bond’s most famous piece, Saved (1965), which caused a furore by depicting a baby in its pram being stoned to death in a park by a group of adolescents.
Despite avoiding a “public” premiere, those involved were still prosecuted; they were found guilty and fined, paving the way for a showdown over Early Morning (1968). In this surrealistic fantasy, Bond concocted such an impishly puerile world of reversed Victorian values that Queen Victoria had a sexual relationship with Florence Nightingale (who changed sex twice), her husband and children on arrival in heaven displayed cannibalistic appetites, and Gladstone lectured the workers on how to kick down their opponents.
Early Morning was the last play the Lord Chamberlain banned, but it was produced despite that; the end of his rule had been hastened by the prosecution for Saved,
which spurred a parliamentary review of the law, resulting in the abolition of censorship in the 1968 Theatres Act, after 231 years.
Bond continued to disturb his audiences. In a version of Shakespeare’s King Lear re-titled Lear (1971), a sequence in which the King himself was blinded was staged with such realism in a 1980s revival at the Barbican by the Royal Shakespeare Company in its studio The Pit that spectators, including critics, fainted when a medical machine for removing eyes went slowly into apparently visible action. Nauseated playgoers, leaving the small auditorium during the performance, collided with others on their way back in a narrow passage-way also being used by the actors so that entrances and exits were interrupted.
Bond insisted that the nastier side of his plays had a valid political purpose – “The shock is justified by the desperation of the situation or as a way of forcing the audience to search for reasons in the rest of the play… It’s only because I feel it is important to involve people in the realities of life that I sometimes use those effects.”
He had his champions, apart from William Gaskill, who eventually gave up directing his plays because they were becoming didactic, a criticism levelled at his later work in general. John Gielgud played Shakespeare in Bingo (Royal Court, 1974), which depicted the playwright as a rapacious landlord in comfortable retirement at Stratford-on-avon. The Fool (Royal Court, 1975) portrayed the poet John Clare as a long-suffering artist from the working class.
Confirming Bond’s prestige, in 1978 the National chose The Woman, about the Trojan Queen Hecuba and her struggle against the Athenians, as its first new play for the Olivier auditorium, with Bond himself directing his echoes of Euripides. His epic trilogy, The War Plays, looking at the moral quandaries faced by those living in an age of potential nuclear annihilation, was staged by the RSC at the Barbican’s Pit in 1985. And in the early 1990s at the National Judi Dench performed his most easily enjoyed comedy, The Sea, playing, wittily, the matriarchal Mrs Rafi.
All his work was based on the same analysis: he took the view that society was a product of repression and the aggression which resulted. He said: “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.”
Born of working-class London parents on July 18 1934, Thomas Edward Bond grew up in Holloway; despite being evacuated as a child during the war he was present during the bombing of the capital in 1940 and 1944, a formative exposure to violence.
He was educated at Crouch End secondary modern, leaving at 15 to work in factories and offices before his National Service in the Army, joining the occupation forces in Vienna between 1953 and 1955. After writing plays and poetry in his spare time, he had his first stage work, The Pope’s Wedding, acted on a Sunday night at the Royal Court in 1962. It dealt, almost cinematically in its episodic style, with a young man who left his rowdy friends to take up with a hermit.
After becoming a play-reader for the English Stage Company, Bond joined the Royal Court writers’ group. Saved, his second play, set in South London, brought him fame not only for its detailed picture of a joyless working-class family in which a young couple engages in sporadic attempts at sexual intercourse in the living room, but also for that street scene in which louts begin idly throwing stones into a pram until they realise that they had killed its tiny occupant. This prolonged act of simulated violence was described by many critics at the time as gratuitous, but has since come to be regarded as a landmark moment in post-war drama.
Following on from the controversy over that and Early Morning (1968), Bond’s fourth play, Narrow Road to the Deep North (Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1968) was a political and moral satire about imperialism. After Black Mass (1970), which contributed to a commemoration of the Sharpeville massacre, and Passion (Royal Court, 1971), in aid of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, came Lear (1971). This subversive take on Shakespeare’s original showed the tyrannical king becoming a radical opponent of the regime he helped usher in. After such darkness the relatively genial comedy The Sea (Royal Court, 1973), set beside the seaside before the First World War, provided a welcome change of tone.
Work with students in Birmingham and the North yielded a number of plays, the most notable being The Worlds (1979), which, drawing on the unrest of the time and marking a shift towards more radical politics, justified the execution of businessmen by terrorists, arguing: “We’re all terrorists. Every one of us.”
Back at the Royal Court in 1981 Bond wrote, with Nick Bicat, Restoration, a play with music satirising Restoration comedy and pointing up comparisons with the ongoing class system. Summer (1982), “a play for Europe” set in socialist Yugoslavia, was staged at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe.
The War Plays (1985), which he directed himself, reflected a period of growing antagonism with theatre institutions; he left rehearsals before the premiere and criticised the production, severing his connection with the RSC. This period of estrangement lasted until 1996 and the RSC’S staging of In the Company of Men,
inspired by Bernard Shaw’s satire on the arms industry Major Barbara.
Nevertheless, Bond became the great outsider of British theatre – writing plays in the knowledge that they would not be staged here except by amateur companies. Like Shaw he expended considerable intellectual energy on writing prefaces to work, and arguing his theories in essays and other writings. He also worked on film screenplays including Blow-up, Walkabout
and Nicholas and Alexandra.
From 1997, he envisaged dystopian societies in plays such as Coffee, The Crime of the Twenty-first Century, Born, People and Innocence; these were championed in France by director Alain Francon to such an extent that Bond dubbed the group of work “The Paris Pentad”.
Some of this work and other plays was presented by the Birmingham-based theatre-in-education company Big Brum, which Bond regarded as a crucial artistic relationship; 2012 saw it mount two premieres: The Broken Bowl and The Edge. “I
love writing for the young,” he said. “They’re not interested in plays about paying the mortgage. They’re interested in the universe and the kitchen table.”
Signs of British theatre’s continuing admiration for him were apparent in his later years. Lear was staged at the Crucible in Sheffield in 2005. Restoration was toured in 2006 by the Oxford Stage Company; and in 2008, Jonathan Kent revived The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, though the author disapproved, preferring an earlier revival at Chichester. As a consequence, that show’s director Sean Holmes was allowed to present the first London production of Saved for 27 years in 2011 at the Lyric Hammersmith. “The play is more relevant now. I’m certain of that. There’s a huge hollowness in our society,” he said at the time.
Fifty years after Saved, he was still pushing things to extremes with his final play, Dea (2016), a three-hour catalogue of horrors, loosely inspired by Medea; he directed it himself at the Secombe Theatre, Sutton. Remaining wary of the institutions he had once been attached to, Bond refused, for instance, to take part in the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2006.
Despite his reputation for truculence of personality and bleakness of dramatic vision, to regard Bond’s artistic project as consumed by negativity would be to misunderstand him. “If you’re going to despair, stop writing,” he told the
Guardian’s Michael Billington. “If my plays are staged and acted in the way in which they are written, what comes across is a colossal affirmation of life.”
Edward Bond married, in 1971, Elisabeth Pablé; she died in 2017.