With Bond’s passing, the world of theatre has lost someone whose radical ideas and dramatic theories sparked outrage as well as inspired dramatists in India
manner in which youngsters had partaken of such a brutal and violent act. This scene became reason enough for Britain’s censorship board to ban the production. In his own defence, Bond stated, “I write for human salvation... drama is about justice, about social justice”.
Theatre stalwarts like Laurence Olivier intervened, condemning the censorship. In a letter to the press, Olivier stated, “Saved is not a play for children but for grownups, and the grownups of this country should have the courage to look at it.” Though the Royal Court Theatre lost the case, in the longrun, Saved created waves that led to the abolition of stage censorship in Britain altogether in 1968.
One often asks whether art has any real power or agency to bring about a change in society. In the instance of Saved, we find that Bond’s efficacy lay in his unrelenting resistance to any cuts in either the production or the printed version. He remained committed to his beliefs, winning the day with theatre companies across the world choosing to stage Saved, including a brilliant production by the young German director Peter Stein, at the Schaubühne in Berlin. Its theme undoubtedly spoke to the hopelessness and helplessness that prevailed across Europe during the 60s and 70s.
Indian ripples
Closer home, as a young director, I chanced upon a script of Saved and felt compelled to stage it. It was
August 1975. There was a sense of unease across the country as Emergency had been declared a few months earlier in June. A lurking sense of fear of being exposed to unknown forces made one anxious. This was one of my reasons for staging this play at the time. The young actors of Ruchika Theatre Group who had asked me to direct a play for them, seemed to have the requisite spirit, and an immediate understanding of the uncontrolled hysteria that overtakes the play. Alok
Nath, Mona Chawla, Arun Kukreja and Kusum Haidar brought the play alive, while the acutely angled levels that rose up from the stage floor, the battered sofa, the strange ‘nets’ that were suspended from the flies, were elements of Nissar Allana’s surreal set that provided the spectator with images of a tentative and unstable world, one that reflected the precariousness of the times.
Another Bond script that was staged in Delhi was Narrow Road to the Deep North, directed by Ebrahim Alkazi at the National School of
Drama (NSD) in 1973. A satirical play on the British Empire, it was a political parable set in Japan in the Edo period, dealing with the poet Basho and the changing political landscape over 35 years. Told with Brechtian simplicity, here we saw the conflict between two worlds: an extravagant world where Britannia ruled and the cool samurai deliberation of a traditional Japan. Raising moral issues, Alkazi’s production highlighted satirical references to historic events at a time when we in India had begun to reinvestigate our experience of colonialism.
Another Bond play, The Fool, was directed by Barry John for the NSD Repertory. It is interesting to note that since the early 70s, Bond was one of the few playwrights who wrote long prefaces to his plays that contained his meditations on capitalism, violence, technology, and the postmodern imagination. These essays can be viewed as Bond’s comprehensive theory on the use and means of drama.
Ebrahim Alkazi: Holding Time Captive.