Playwright, part of group of ‘angry young men’, shocked the theatre world

— Edward Bond, a playwright who shocked the British theatre world with his explosive 1965 drama Saved, has died, his agent said. He was 89.

Bond’s literary agency, Casarotto Ramsay and Associates, said that he died on Sunday. No cause of death was given.

Bond was born in London on July 18, 1934, and his childhood was overshadowed by the Second World War, which saw the city repeatedly bombed. He left school at 15, worked in factories and served two years in the army before gaining success as a writer.

His first play, The Pope’s Wedding, was staged in 1962 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, which shook up British drama with plays by Bond, John Osborne and other writers dubbed the “angry young men.”

Three years later, the same venue staged Saved, a play about alienated urban youth that included a scene in which a gang of teenagers stone a baby to death in its pram. At the time, plays needed approval from an official known as the Lord Chamberlain, and the Royal Court was prosecuted for staging Saved without a licence.

Among its defenders was actor-director Laurence Olivier, who wrote to The Observer newspaper: “Saved is not a play for children but it is for grownups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it.”

The theatre lost the case, and both Saved and Bond’s next play, Early Morning, a scabrous satire on British royalty, were banned in Britain.

The controversy sparked a legal review that, in 1968, ended stage censorship in Britain. Saved is now regarded as a modern classic and has been produced around the world.

Several of Bond’s plays drew inspiration from William Shakespeare, including The Sea, which evokes The Tempest, and Lear, a reworking of King Lear. Shakespeare was the central character in Bingo, produced in 1974 with John Gielgud as the Bard in the last years of his life.

An exacting character who often fell out with directors, Bond wrote more than 50 plays, including 18th-century class comedy Restoration and trilogy The War Plays. He influenced younger playwrights, notably the late Sarah Kane, whose 1995 play Blasted shocked audiences as much as Saved had 30 years earlier.

His final play to be staged, in 2016, was Dea, a forceful adaptation of the Greek tragedy Medea.

Bond also worked on movie screenplays, including BlowUp— which earned him an Academy Award nomination — and