EDWARD BOND

SAVED(1965)

EDWARD BOND Bond was born on 18 July 1934 into a working-class family in

Holloway, North London. In 1940, as a child during the World War II he was evacuated to

Cornwall and subsequently to his grandparents in Elly. However, he was in London during the bombings in 1940 and 1944. This early exposure to the violence and terror of war probably shaped themes in his work, while his experience of the evacuation gave him an awareness of social alienation which would characterise his writing.

In 1944, he attended Crouch End Secondary Modern School. As he was not thought enough to take the eleven-plus exam, he left school at the age of fifteen. While still in school, he saw Donald Wolfit’s production of Macbeth, which had a profound impact upon him.

He explained that this performance was the first time he had been presented with traumatic experiences comparable to his own in a way he could apprehend and give meaning to.

His first contact with theatre was music-hall. After leaving school with only a basic education, he educated himself, driven by an impressive eagerness for knowledge.

After various jobs in factories and offices, he did his national service in the British Army occupation forces in Vienna between 1953 and 1955.

During this time in the army he discovered the naked violence hidden behind normal social behaviour and decided to start writing.

Back in London, he educated himself in theatre while working and exercised his skill by writing drama sketches. He was especially impressed by the performances of the Berliner Ensemble in the summer of 1956. In June 1958, after submitting two plays to the Royal Court Theatre, which were rejected, Bond was invited to join its newly formed writers’ group.

After three years studying with writers his age but already well-known, Bond had his real first play, The Pope’s Wedding, staged as a Sunday night “performance without décor” at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962. Its title refers to “an impossible ceremony” and it is set in contemporary Essex which shows the death of rural society brought by modern post-war urban living standards.

Bond’s next play, Saved (1965) became one of the best cause célebrés in 20th century British theatre history. Saved delves into the lives of South London working class youths suppressed by a brutal ecenomic system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift eventually into barbarous mutual violence. Among them, one character, Len, persistently tries to maintain links between people violently tearing each other to pieces. The play shows the social causes of violence and opposes them with individual freedom.

The play was directed by William Gaskill, then artistic director of the Royal Court. The Theatre Acts 1843 was still in force and required the scripts to be submitted for approval by the Lord Chamberlain. Saved included a scene featuring the stoning to death of a baby in its pram. The lord Chamberlain sought to censor it but Bond refused to alter a word, claiming that removing this pivotal scene would alter the meaning of the play. He was firmly backed by Gasker and the Royal Court.

For this reason, Saved was first presented on November 3, 1965, at the Royal Court Theatre, London, as a private club production of the English Stage Society.

The production caused an uproar. On opening night, there were shouts of outrage from the audience and physical violence in the foyers during the intermission and after the show.

Bond and the Royal Court continued to defy the censor, and in 1967 produced a new play, the surreal Early Morning. This play potrays a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale. The Royal Court produced the play despite the imposition of a total ban and within a year the law was finally repealed.

In 1969, when the Royal Court was finally able to perform Bond’s work legally, it put on and toured the three plays in Europe, winning the Belgrade International Theatre Festival prize.

The experience of prosecution and mutual support sealed a link between Bond and the Royal Court where all his plays would be premiered until 1976.

Bond composed his new major work, Lear, based on Shakespeare’s King Lear in 1971. The play follows the decay of an aging tyrannical king.

Bond then produced two pieces exploring the place of the artsist in the society.

Bingo(1974) potrayed the retired Shakespeare as an exploitative landlord, an impotent yet compassionate witness of social violence, who eventually commitas suicide, repeatedly asking himslef “Was anything done?”

The Fool (1975) reinterprets the life of the rural 19th century poet John Clare.

His early 1980s plays were directly influenced by the coming to power of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher and the profound social changes they were bringing about.

Restoration(1988), as a half-musical parody of Restoration comedies, deals with the working class support for Tories by showing a servant accepting his conviction and eventual execution for a murder committed by his cynical and silly master.

In the mid-1980s, Bond’s work had a new beginning with the triology of The War Plays. Motivated by the threats of the last years of the Cold War and the political activism it provoked in Britain and Europe, Bond had planned to write about nuclear war since the early 1980s.

Between 1984 and 1985 he wrote three plays which he united as The War Plays. The first, Red Black and Ignorant is a short agit-prop play in which a child, aborted and burnt to death in the nuclear war global bombings, comes from the future to accuse the society of the audience of his murder.The second, The Tin Can People denounces capitalist society’s ideology of death. The third, Great Peace, focuses on a soldier who kills his baby sister and mother who tries to kill her neighbour’s child to save her own.

Bond deals with lack of communication, dysfunctional family and unhealthy relationships in the society in his plays. He presents violent scenes, domestic violenc in the house and lack of morals in his plays. Bond uses external settings alot. He was influenced by a French Movement named “theatre of cruelty.”

This genre is a surrealist form of theatre which was theorized by Antonin Artaud. He was a French dramatist who was affected by Balinese Theatre which is a very primitive kind.

He wrote the book The Theatre and Its Double in which Balinese Theatre and Theatre of Cruelty were mentioned. This genre’s aim is to shock the audience into realisation. The spectators are to be awed and even terrified to such a degree that they will lose the control of their reason. Artaud’s aim was to present violence and cruelty for the sake of cruelty. The spectators must be disturbed and shaken in their minds.

The purpose is to attack to the subconscious of the spectator in order to release and reveal the hidden fears and anxities which are normally suppressed.

Action is in the foreground more than language. Screams, cries, symbolic gestures, madness,

perversion are common.

SETTING Saved has thirteen scenes with an intermission

suggested after the seventh. Bond uses simple setting. The setting becomes more claustrophobic as the lives of the characters become constricted.

PLOT The plot of Saved takes place over a period of two

years. Bond does not show the development of characters over that time but rather shows episodes in the lives of the characters.

An interesting plot device is the placing of the murder of the baby in the first act. Although the scene is central to the play, by placing it in the first act Bond is able to focus attention on the situation surrounding the murder, rather than focusing on the build-up to the murder.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT With the exception of Len, there is really no character

development at all in saved and that is deliberate and part of the point of the play. These characters do not grow, they do not learn from their experiences. Moreover, no explanations are given of their lives or behaviours so that the audience comes to understand their plight. That is also deliberate. Bond wants his audience to react to his view of society by taking action and changing the society itself, not by simply feeling compassion for the characters trapped in their hopeless situations. Therefore, the audience is shown effects which are shocking and the audience must involve themselves to arrive at the causes.

LANGUAGE Bond’s language is not simple transcription; it is

carefully chosen and shaped to convey the play’s motivation and themes. Its short structure is highly poetic and comic. It is used as aggression or to defend against the aggression of others or to keep others away. Richard Scharine points out, in Saved, the characters mistrust words and for them “ language as a tool functions only hold others at a distance.”

Topics for next week: Alienation and Loneliness Anger and Hatred Guilt and Innocence Limitations and Opportunities Love and Passion Morals and Morality Science and Technology Sex Violence