EDWARD BOND died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.
These three facts appear unrelated. In fact they are tightly entwined. Bond broke official censorship of the theatre in Britain and helped imbue it with a historic weight that seems foreign today. His 1965 play Saved, featured a climactic scene in which a bunch of young men stone an infant to death in its own pram.
Large sections of the public would be shocked. But first it shocked key parts of the civil service, most significantly the Lord Chamberlain’s office. This was a government department that since 1737 had held absolute authority over what plays could and could not be staged in the United Kingdom. (That such an organization even existed in that moment suggests a theatre world that mattered far more than we know today.) When its members read the script for Saved, they declared its key scene indecent and informed the Royal Court Theatre that it could not be publicly performed.
Bond refused to change a single line. The Royal Court supported him, and presented it in its unaltered form. Technically, the theatre adhered to the letter of the law, temporarily transforming itself into a private club, therefore outside the Lord Chamberlain’s remit.
The manouvre half-worked. Audience members walked out of Saved; some shouted at and jeered the performers. Critics condemned the play. Bond, a lifelong socialist, argued that his portrayal of the baby’s death wasn’t an endorsement, but rather an examination of the inhumanity and subjugation he saw in everyday life. The play’s protagonist, Len, doesn’t take part in the stoning. It is suggested that those around Len view his decency as weakness, chalking it up to having never served in the army.
Despite this, Len manages to keep the murdered baby’s family from falling apart. Years later, Bond candidly called this ending “almost irresponsibly optimistic.” He also provocatively claimed that the baby’s death was “inconsequential beside the cultural and emotional deprivation of most of our children.”
Bond understood this deprivation firsthand. He was born in 1934 in the Holloway district of London – where Saved is set. His rural parents had moved to the city after Bond’s father lost his job as a farm laborer in East Anglia. The young Bond was among the thousands of children evacuated from London during the German blitz, but was present for some of the bombings. Bond would later recall the experience of seeing “people running for their lives” as formative.
He left school at age 15 with no qualifications. A performance of Macbeth he attended in school left its mark, though, and he showed a talent for writing. After a few years working various jobs, he completed his national service as part of the British Army’s occupation of Vienna. The quotidian brutality he witnessed, the humiliation and degradation that wove into daily life, cemented something in him, and he started writing stories, poems, and plays.
In 1958, he was accepted into the newly formed writers’ group of the Royal Court Theatre. Then run by the English Stage Company (as it is to this day), by the early 60s the Royal Court had become known for occupying the edgier, more daring and discontented side of theatre, telling stories that often reflected deep dissatisfaction with what had become of post-war Britain: John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack, Arnold Wesker’s Chips With Everything.
Though other controversial plays had been staged at the Royal Court using the same workaround as Saved, public outcry attracted the attention of the legal system. After a flurry of splashy headlines and an investigation, the Royal Court Theatre was fined only a token amount. The fiasco revealed the Lord Chamberlain as a toothless anachronism in the modern age. In 1967, Parliament assembled a committee on the matter of theatre and public decency. The committee later declared that that there was no need to censor theatrical performances.
By this time, unaware its days were numbered, the Lord Chamberlain was taking aim at Bond’s follow-up, Early Morning, also in production at the Royal Court. One delights at the conniptions this surreal and bawdy play likely induced in the censors, how they reeled and gasped at the portrayal of a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, all while Prince Albert and Benjamin Disraeli plot the Queen’s overthrow. The play culminates with Vicky strangling Albert to death, then staging a perverse cannibalistic orgy. Bond was clearly goading the censors. “The events of this play are true” read his epigraph. “This play may not be performed,” replied the Lord Chamberlain. No edits or rewrites, just a blanket ban.
The Royal Court attempted the same tactic it had with Saved, but on the night of the play’s would-be premier, police arrived and questioned the actors, scuppering further performances. Plans were made to stage Early Morning as a free dress rehearsal, but the legislative fallout from Parliament’s inquiry made subterfuge unnecessary. The Theatres Act of 1968 essentially stripped the Lord Chamberlain’s Office of its censorship powers. In the context of the heady days of the late 1960s, Edward Bond became a cause celebre. The next year, the Royal Court staged an entire season of his plays, including Saved and Early Morning.
Ask the right questions
That a stage play could generate such controversy, that the words of a strange gaggle of scribblers and players might be relevant and social life beyond their dark corner of the city, seems strange by today’s standards. But then, with only a handful of TV channels and the home computer still a decade off, theatre occupied a different place in everyday culture.
Some of it was also down to the times themselves. Come the 1970s, British theatre’s center of gravity was pulled in a manic and exciting direction by the country’s mood: the constant crises of government, daily news of the American charnel house in Vietnam, the turmoils in Northern Ireland, militant strikes and social movements. This was the context that gave rise to some of Britain’s most daring and radical playwrights: Trevor Griffiths, David Edgar, Caryl Churchill and others.
In their textbook Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright describe this mood:
Not every playwright of the ‘70s was politically on the left, but being left-wing was the mood of the time and the extent to which a writer did or didn’t chime with it was the crucial definition. When playwrights formed the Theatre Writers’ Group to campaign for better fees and rehearsal conditions, it seemed natural for it swiftly to transform itself in a union seeking affiliation with the TUC; natural for its members to regard themselves as ‘employees’ lucky enough to get their plays; natural, too, that almost every writer of the new wave was a member. Its support from previous waves was self-selecting: Edward Bond but not John Osborne, John Arden but not Tom Stoppard.
No surprise then that the early ‘70s were also the most directly agit-prop era of Bond’s career. In 1970, his short scene Black Mass was written and performed for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre. Passion, another short work, was performed in 1971 for the CND’s Easter Festival. The play has more than a bit of the dark farce of Early Morning in it, portraying Queen and Prime Minister as blank-minded fools making nonsense proclamations in the run-up to nuclear Armageddon.
Bond’s convictions didn’t just lead him to tell certain kinds of stories; it led him to ask how those stories are told. “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners,” Bond would later write. “People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time.”
Very true, but to critique the world that so readily produces violence requires more than simply showing it. By the same token, one cannot critique that world without showing its violence, not just in explicit acts of brutality but in the patterns of daily life – from the military and prisons to work and schools – that engendered them. The censors that decried Saved willfully refused to realize this.
In a sense, what Bond was doing with theatre was nothing new. He would remind readers and interviewers that William Shakespeare had to walk to work across bridges adorned with severed heads of the executed. Shakespeare’s history and tragedy plays all attempt in one way or another to grapple with what a good society might look like.
“[Shakespeare] did not answer his questions because historically they were not answerable at the time,” Bond wrote, “and art is prescribed by the political situation in which it is created.” This was a disorienting and violent England: young capitalism gestating in a feudalist womb, rising merchants whose power was already enabling them to uproot the lives of the more modest and humble. Less than thirty years after Shakespeare’s death, this fragile order erupted. The king lost his own head, and new experiments in democracy briefly flourished.
Bond’s love of Shakespeare was that he refused to stop asking the questions that needed to be asked, even if the playwright’s pen could never reach the answer. “He lived on the edge of a political revolution, and his plays still work for those who live in this later time of revolution, the twentieth century.”
Bond’s vision for the theatre then was as a vital part of a healthy and thriving demos, spurring discussion and debate that had far more consequence than polite chit-chat during intermission. It’s a tradition that reached back not just to Shakespeare but at least to the ancient Greeks.
It is fitting then that Bond’s plays in the ‘70s plainly wear the influence of Shakespeare and the Jacobeans. Lear, which premiered in 1971 at the Royal Court, borrows the premise from one of Shakespeare’s most revered plays, but takes substantial liberties with it, amplifying its cruelty and gruesomeness. Lear is still the aged monarch, his power and faculties slipping away, prey to his own paranoia. His daughters conspire not just against Lear, but each other, and the husbands whose land they covet. While Shakespeare’s cast out king only understands what a cruel world he has helped build in the play’s final third, Bond’s Lear makes this realization relatively early on. He spends most of the play brutalized and blind, living in internal exile as a feeble voice of conscience while the country descends into civil war.
“What can I do?” Lear asks the wreckage in a short soliloquy. “I left my prison, pulled it down, broke the key, and still I’m a prisoner… There’s a wall everywhere. I’m buried alive in a wall. Does this suffering and misery last for ever? Do we work to build ruins, waste all these lives to make a desert no one could live in? There’s no one to explain it to me, no one I can go to for justice.”
Other plays from the era looked to Shakespeare’s (supposed) life and historical era for direct inspiration. Bingo cast a version of the playwright as a rising merchant and landowner, torn by his conscience as he signs a deal to protect his landholdings so long as he doesn’t interfere with the enclosures of peasant land. Bond’s guilt-ridden Shakespeare ends up committing suicide.
Bond’s irreverent interests in history during this decade led him to see how each epoch manifested its depravity differently. The Fool sets the life of celebrated English country poet John Clare against the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, which, the play implies, collapse his sanity and put him in a lunatic asylum. The Sea – an Edwardian-era retelling Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set in a small village on the East Anglian coast – is filled with well-to-do fops whose sense of propriety extends well beyond their sense of decency, even as people’s lives are ruined. Both these plays, and others of the era, featured frank, even humorous depictions of everyday cruelty. All were critically praised.
A difficult author
Perhaps we should be surprised by the next phase of Bond’s career. Perhaps not. For while Bond’s work was hailed as some of the most provocative and daring in the UK, he soon fell out with every major theatre or institution that might back him.
Though he maintained a basic relationship with the Royal Court through the late 1970s, Bond also found support in the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Both institutions – probably the most recognizable and respected in British theatre at the time – premiered and restaged several of the playwright’s works, in the RSC’s case well into the 1990s. Bond, however, had reached a point in his writing where he craved more direct contact with the stage to experiment with his dramatic ideas, and increasingly insisted on directing his own works.
He had some success with The Woman and Summer, both staged by the National and positively reviewed. Artistic directors and some actors, however, complained about Bond’s uncompromising attitude. Bond, for his part, complained about poor working conditions, and insisted he was attempting to experiment onstage in order to rediscover theatre’s more collaborative and democratic practices. Whatever the case, as the struggles of the 70s gave way to the malaise of the Thatcherite 80s, Bond would find himself saddled with the reputation of “a difficult author.”
For all intents and purposes, The War Plays was the last significant work of Bond’s to be produced by a major stage in Britain. Perhaps his most ambitious work, The War Plays is a sprawling, three-part epic combining poetry, agit-prop, dark comedy and improvisation, digging deep into the pathologies of war and nuclear apocalypse. Bond directed the plays as a group for the RSC in 1985, but left rehearsals before the premiere over artistic disagreements. Though he complained about the end result, The War Plays was warmly received, its probing denunciations of the Cold War resonating with audiences and critics. In any case, Bond made the decision that his new works would be staged outside the UK – France proved particularly receptive – or by educational theatres like Birmingham’s Big Brum.
The War Plays may have signaled something else. Some might say its portrayals of mass degradation were too accurate, too predictive, too in keeping with the social ruin just around the corner. As the infrastructures of solidarity and social coherence were increasingly attacked and eroded by Margaret Thatcher’s seemingly invincible Conservative government, individualism and selfishness took their place at the apex of virtue. A metastasized social sadism couldn’t be far behind. Painting society as sneering and unforgiving was no longer a revelation; it was ordinary common sense, often celebrated.
Telescope that forward to today, when scenes of Ukrainian warzones bob next to cat pics on our laptops, when we can ping pong between clips of teenagers pranking each other and footage of anti-migrant militias on the Texas border. To Bond, all of this represented a crisis in democracy and drama. “Thatcher’s puppet economics destroyed the core logic of drama – human responsibility,” he wrote in a letter to a student. “Inevitably this penetrated social culture.”
And what takes the place of a vibrant drama in a sick and sickening social culture? Bond had a succinct description of it in 1995 Guardian opinion piece: sleaze. He saw this sleaze in the ways major theatre trivialized imagination and the human experience. “The imperative of Greek drama was: know yourself,” he wrote. “Ours is: do not! TV, press, pop culture – all exist to make money, not to seek truth. They serve the culture of death by creating a sham life.”
This contempt didn’t subside as Bond settled into his status of self-imposed quasi-exile. Newspapers still occasionally cared what he had to say, and he was never shy with his opinions on the state of popular culture. He called War Horse, one of the most successful plays in British history, “an obscenity.” He admitted being fascinated by Downton Abbey, but only because he found it so “spitefully patronising.”
Easy as it may be to dismiss all these as the ravings of a cantankerous and uncompromising artist, one can’t help but think that today’s British theatrical establishment might benefit from a healthy dose of Bond’s outlook. Downton Abbey does gloss over the brutality of maintaining artistocratic privilege. War Horse is little more than fanciful adversity porn set amidst the trenches and mustard gas of World War I. But then, with public funding for the arts now in an anemic state, with theatres increasingly forced to rely on sometimes exorbitant ticket sales, the pressure to pander and entertain rather than challenge is quite real.
Bond’s final play, Dea – his first UK premiere in two decades – was staged in 2016 not at one of Britain’s major performance venues but at Secombe Theatre, a small space in London’s outer borough of Sutton. An adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, it is a graphic and shocking update to what is already one of the more brutal Greek tragedies. Critics panned it as overlong and boring, even for all the violence and cruelty.
Were these writers being fair? Or are they simply rehashing the prudishness of yesteryear in a more modern guise? “If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theater,” said Bond, “you’ll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself.” But what if it’s too late? What if, decades later, we are still in Hiroshima? What if, when we can so easily scroll to videos of Israeli soldiers laughing and dancing in empty Gazan playgrounds, our attempts to portray barbarism fall flat?
What then is left for any artform that might suggest a way out? Bond never found any definitive answers to these questions. Maybe they have none. But the world where they are so seldom asked is intolerable as ever.
Alexander Billet is a writer, critic, and artist based in Los Angeles, and a member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective. He is the author of Shake the City: Experiments In Space and Time, Music and Crisis (1968 Press, 2022) recently translated into Portuguese by Brazillian publisher sobinfluencia edições. More of his work can be viewed, and supported, at alexanderbillet.com.