E D WAR D B O N D (1934-ALIVE)

Edward Bond (born 18 July 1934) is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Bond is broadly considered one among the major living dramatists but he has always been and still remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays and the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society and of his theories on drama.

Early life
Edward Bond was born on 18 July 1934 into a lower working class family in Holloway, North London. As a child during World War II he was evacuated to the countryside but had been present during the bombings on London in 1940 and 1944. This early exposure to the violence and terror of war probably shaped themes in his work and his experience of the evacuation gave him awareness for strangeness in social life which will remain typical of his writing. His first contact with theatre was music-hall where his sister used to be sawn in two as the sideshow of a conjurer. At fourteen he saw with his class a performance of Shakespeares Macbeth by Donald Wolfit which was revelatory. He later explained this performance was the first time he was told about his traumatic experiences in such a way that he could apprehend it and give meaning to it. At fifteen he left school after gaining only a very low education and kept from this experience a deep sense of social exclusion that achieved to found his political orientation. Bond then educated himself, led by an impressive eagerness for knowledge.After various jobs in factories or offices, he accomplished his national service in the British Army occupation forces in Vienna between 1953 to 1955. During his time in the army he discovered the naked social violence which is hidden behind usual behaviours in society and convinced himself to start writing. Back in London, he educated himself in theatre while working and saw everything he could on stage and exercice his skill by writing sketches of plays. He was specifically impressed by the performances of the Berliner Ensemble in summer 1956. In June 1958, after he submitted two plays to the Royal Court Theatre (The Fiery Tree and Klaxon in Atreus' Place that Bond keeps unpublished) he was invited to join its newly formed writers' group.

Mid-1960s to mid-1970s: first plays and association with the Royal Court
After three years studying with writers his age but already known (like John Arden, Arnold Wesker, and Ann Jellicoe), Bond had his real first play, The Popes Wedding given as a Sunday night 'performance without dcor' at the Court in 1962. This is a falsely naturalistic drama (whose title alludes to "an impossible ceremony") set in the contemporary Essex that show through a tragic case the dying of the rural society gained by modern post-war urban standards of life. Bond's next play, Saved (1965) became one of the best known cause clbres in 20th century British theatre history. Saved (actually titled after a goalkeeper saved) delves into the lives of a selection of working class South London youths, who, suppressed by a brutal economic system as Bond would see it, unable to give their life a meaning, drift eventually into barbarous and mutual violence; among them one character, Len, enduringly tries (and succeeds) to maintain links between people violently tearing each other to pieces. The play intends to show socially built causes of violence and to oppose these individual freedom. This will remain Bonds major theme all through his work. The play was directed by William Gaskill, then artistic director of the Royal Court. The Theatres Act 1843 was still in force and required scripts to be submitted for approval by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. 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 and was firmly backed by Gaskill and the Royal Court though he was threaten by serious troubles. Formation of a theatre club normally allowed plays that had been banned for their language or subject matter to be performed under 'club' conditions - such as that at the Comedy Theatre, however the English Stage Society were prosecuted. An active campaign sought to overturn the prosecution, with a passionate defence presented by Laurence Olivier, then Artistic Director of the National Theatre. The court found the English Stage Society guilty and they were given a conditional discharge. Bond, and the Royal Court continued to defy the censor, and in 1967 produced a new play, the surreal Early Morning. This portrays a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, the royal Princes as Siamese twins, Disraeli and Prince Albert as plotting a coup and the whole dramatis personae as being damned to a cannibalistic Heaven after falling off Beachy Head. 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 could finally perform legally Bonds work, it put on and toured its three plays in Europe, winning Belgrade International Theatre Festival prize. This experience of prosecution and mutual support sealed a link between Bond and the Royal Court where all his plays (except external commissions) would be premiered until 1976, most of them directed by Gaskill.

As Bonds work remained banned for performance in Britain, Saved became the greatest international success of its time and knew more than thirty different productions all around the world between 1966 and 1969, often by notorious directors such as Peter Stein in Germany or Claude Rgy in France.The play was everywhere controversial then but it is now considered as a 20th century classic. After a few commissioned works (the British Empire satire Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) for the Coventry People and City Festival, two agit-prop plays for festival performances, Black Mass (1970) to commemorate the Sharpeville Massacre and Passion (1971) for the CND Easter Festival) Bond composed his new major work, Lear, after Shakespeare's King Lear. The play follows the decay of an aging tyrannical king betrayed by his two cynical daughters, chased as a political danger after his military defeat, followed by the ghost of a man he destroyed the life and caused the death, imprisoned and tortured till hes enucleated, who finally finds, after a life of violence, wisdom and peace in a radical opposition to the power. The end of the play shows him as a forced labourer in a camp setting an example for future rebellion by sabotaging the wall he once was building, and which subsequent regimes are perpetuating. In 1974 Bond translated Spring Awakening (1891) by the German playwright Frank Wedekind about the suppression of adolescent sexuality. The play had been censored or presented with major cuts since its writing, and Bond's was the first translation to restore Wedekind's original text, including its most controversial scenes. The subdued Edwardian-set comedy The Sea (1973) shows a sea-side community on England East Coast a few years before World War I dominated by a dictatorial lady and overwhelmed by the drowning of one of its young fellow citizen. Nurtured by his experience as a child evacuee to the seaside, the play is (rightly) subtitled a comedy and was intended to be an encouraging impulse after the gloomy mood of his previous plays.This is enacted by the successful escape of a young and promising couple from this oppressive small society. This play would be the last plays of Bonds Gaskill directed. He then produced two pieces exploring the place of the artist in society: Bingo (1974) which portrayed the retired Shakespeare as an exploitative landlord impotent though compassionate witness of social violence who eventually commits suicide repeatedly asking himself Was anything done?; and The Fool (1975) which reinterprets the life of the rural 19th century poet John Clare, involving him in the Littleport Riots of 1816, and then making him depository in his own poetry of the spirit of this rural rebellion against the growing modern industrial capitalism; the failure of this historical class war eventually drives him to a madhouse. In 1976 Bingo won the Obie award as Best OffBroadway play and The Fool voted best play of the year by Plays and Players.

From the 1970s to the mid-1980s: broaden scope of practice and political experiments

Bond remained a successful playwright in England all along the 1970s, expanding his range of writing and collaborations. His plays were asked by institutional and community theatres, for premiere and revival, and he was commissioned plays both by renown institutions and fringe activists companies. For example, in 1976, he wrote on one hand Stone and A-A-America (pronounce as a sneeze) two agit-prop like plays respectively for the Gay Sweatshop and the Almost-Free Theatre and on another hand a adaptation of Websters The White Devil for Michael Lindsay-Hogg to re-open the Old Vic and a libretto for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to open at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden: We Came to The River (in 1982 the pair collaborated again, less successfully on another opera, The Cat). Bonds working relationship with the Royal Court progressively slackens though, and by the mid 70s he found a new partner in the Royal Shakespeare Company. Beginning with Bingo in 1976, the RSC regularly revived and toured his plays until the early 1990s, and Bond, though often disagreeing with the esthetical choices of its productions or protesting for not being consulted enough, recognized the genuine support the company gave to his work.In 1977 the RSC commissioned him a new play for the opening of their new place in London, the Warehouse, which will be The Bundle. Set in an imaginary medieval Japan and exploiting an anecdote from Japanese classic poet Bash , the play shows a revolution eventually successful but whose leader constantly faces the human cost of political change and experiences the uselessness of an ideology of compassion, as being politically counterproductive and a support for reactionary violent power. Bond assigned the same political concern to his next play, The Woman, set in a fantasy Trojan War after Euripides Trojan Women. Like Lear, it shows the fight of the decayed Trojan monarch, Hecuba, fighting Athenian empire and succeeding only when she leaves the aristocracy and the states interests to physically meet the proletariat and join the peoples cause. In 1977, Bond accepted an Honorary Doctorate by Yale University (though thirty years before he was not allowed to sit for his eleven-plus examination) and began to take up students workshops in Newcastle, Durham or Birmingham, for which he wrote several plays. The most accomplished among them was The Worlds he wrote for the Newcastle University Theatre Society, exploiting the recent events in the UK, both the Northern Ireland conflict and the social crisis of the winter of Discontent. His early 1980s plays were directly influenced by the coming to power of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher and their liberal politics. Restoration, as a half-musical parody of restoration comedies, deals with the support the working class gave the Tories by showing a servant accepting to be convinced and finally executed for a murder committed by his cynical and silly master. Summer deals with the moral ambiguities of capitalism through the conflict of two women in socialist Yugoslavia: one, the daughter of the ex-landlords, whose compassionate mind doesnt prevent from being exploiters and collaborationists during German occupation, the other, daughter of the exservants, who refuses the values of the former though she once saved her from firing squad. Derek, written for a youth festival, alludes directly to the Falklands war and shows

an idiotic aristocrat steeling the brain of a gifted worker and sending him to die in a war in a country that sounds like the name of a disease.

Controversial directing attempts and quarrels with the institutions

During the late 1970s, Bond, considering he needed practical contact with the stage to experiment his ideas on drama and improve his writing began directing himself his own plays and progressively made this a condition for their first production. After staging Lear in German at the Burgtheater, in Vienna in 1973, Bond directed his last four plays in London between 1978 and 1982: The Worlds and Restoration at the Royal Court and The Woman and Summer at the National Theatre. These latter two introduced the strong South African actress Yvonne Bryceland, Bond admired and considered her ideal female interpreter. The Woman was the first contemporary play performed in the recently opened Olivier auditorium and, though poorly reviewed, the production was acclaimed as an aesthetic success, especially for it innovative use of its huge open stage. However Bonds working relationships as a director with both the National Theatre and the Royal Court were highly conflicting. These theatres and their actors accused him for being authoritarian and abstract in his directing purpose and unrealistic in his productions requirements, and Bond used to complain undiplomatically about their lack of artistic involvement and had crude rows both with some reluctant actors and theatre managers.He felt that the British theatre was unable to understand how he intended to renew modern drama and couldnt fulfil anymore his artistic demands. By his notorious uncompromising attitude, Bond gained the reputation of being a difficult author, founded but spread with irony and complacency, which contributed to keep him away from the major English stages. During the mid-80s, he was repeatedly refused by Peter Hall to direct himself at the National Theatre his new play Human Cannon he wrote for Yvonne Bryceland and the wide stage of the Olivier. In 1985, he made an attempt to direct at the RSC his War Plays, accepting very bad working conditions, but left the rehearsals before the premiere after disastrous sessions and then violently criticized the production and the theatre. He then decided not to let his plays premiered in London institutional theatres unless he gets proper working conditions. He only accepted to come back to the RSC to direct In the Company of Men in 1996 but considered this production a failure. He nevertheless regularly agreed revivals and sometimes involves himself in these productions, though he remains generally unsatisfied and directed workshops for its actors with Cicely Berry. Except two plays written for the BBC in the early 1990s (Ollys Prison and Tuesday) Bond kept writing plays knowing they wouldnt be staged in England apart by amateur companies. These conflicts are still highly controversial and Bond and his detractors keep settling their scores in letters, books and interviews.

The turning point of the 1980s

Nevertheless, in the mid-1980s, Bond would offer his work a new beginning with the trilogy of The War Plays. Urged by the threats of the last years of the Cold War and the political activism it provoked it England and Europe, Bond planned to write about nuclear war in the early 80s. He found a means to do so after he tested a storyline with Sicilian students in Palermo. To point the barbarity of a society which plan to kill the enemys children to protect their owns (thats how he reduced the logic of nuclear deterrence), he suggested an improvisation in which a soldier was ordered to kill a child of his community to curb a massive starvation. According to Bond, each student improvising as the soldier renounced kill a stranger child and, as a paradox, turned back home to kill its sibling instead .He saw in this a force deeply rooted in the individual that preserved an innate sense for justice he theorized as Radical Innocence and subsequently built on this concept a comprehensive theory of drama in its anthropological and social role what intends to go beyond Brechts theories on political drama. This discovery also gave him the key to write on nuclear war, not to just to condemn war in its atrocity in a general way but, in a political perspective questioning the actual acceptance of it and the collaboration to it by ordinary citizens. Between 1984 and 1985, he wrote three plays for various requests, he united as The War Plays. The first, Red Black and Ignorant (written for a Festival dedicated to George Orwell), is a short agit-prop play where a child, aborted and burnt to death in the nuclear global bombings, comes from the future to accuse the society of the audience of his murder. The second, The Tin Can People (written for a young activists company), denounces the ideology of death of the capitalist society by showing a community of survivors living on an infinite can stocks, turning berserk when they feel threaten by a stranger and destroying all they have as in a reduced nuclear war. The third, Great Peace (written for the RSC) re-enacts the Palermo improvisation in a city hardly surviving in the aftermaths of a nuclear bombardment and focuses on both the soldier who will kill his baby-sister and his mother who herself tries to kill her neighbours child to save hers. The play then follows her twenty years later in the global sterile wilderness nuclear war has turn the world into, where she rebuilds her humanness bit by bit by meeting other survivors. These desperate efforts to stay human or be human anew in an inhuman situation will be the purpose of the most characters in Bonds subsequent plays whose scope will be to explore the limits and possibilities of humanness. His next play Jackets exploits again the Palermo improvisation and sets a confrontation between two young men manipulated by military conspiracies, first in medieval Japan, then in contemporary urban riots. In the Company of Men shows the desperate fight for the adoptive son of an armament factory manager to be who he is within the world of intrigue and cynicism of neo-liberal business that Bond considers the mirror of our post-modern times. In Ollys Prison a man who killed his daughter and forgot his crime tries to give a meaning to his life. In Tuesday a young deserter tries to tell the truth on the war but is destroyed by the society. More innovative in his structure, Coffee intends to expose the cultural roots of violence by confronting a first imaginary part which looks like a gloomy fairy tale where a mother

kills her child because she cannot feed her anymore and a second realistic part that reproduces the historical Babi Yar massacre where the same are among the victims; like in the Palermo improvisation a soldier realise he cant shoot them anymore, and eventually decides to shoot his officer and escapes with the girl.

The recent years

From 1997 to 2008, Bond explored in height plays a gloomy vision of a future society in 2077 where the potential menaces of social break up and bio-political control of the present have become real and structural. The first in this cycle, The Crime of the 21st Century, shows a few outcasts who fled normalised and over-controlled cities to hide in a no-mans-land and try in vain to rebuild their humanness in creating a semblance of community. Have I None, Chair and The Under Room shows the dull life in the cities where social relationships and memory have been abolished, consumption and possession standardized, and where people are harassed by the resistance of their imagination and panicked by strangers. Born and Innocence follow the actions of a militarized police, the Wapos, perpetrating atrocities on reluctant civilians during mass deportations, but among whom one tries to find a human sense for his life and to escape from the alienated and criminal condition he is trapped in. Though isolated from the institutional British theatres, Bond found two new partners in around the mid-90s who will maintain vivid his impulse for writing. One is the Birmingham-based theatre-in-education company Big Brum of which he is an associate artist. From 1995 to 2009 he wrote for this company seven plays dedicated to young audiences very different in forms: At the Inland Sea (1995), in which a youth confronts the legacy of the holocaust; Eleven Vests (1997), on scholastic and military authoritarianism; Have I None (2000), The Balancing Act (2003), The Under Room (2005) and The Tune (2007) and A Window (2009). Big Brum appears, so, to be the only professional company in England he writes for and allows premiering his plays for twenty years. This collaboration brought Bonds theories on drama to a broader attention in England which is now relayed by the National Association for Teaching of Drama. In 2000, he also wrote The Children to be played by pupils at Manor Community College in Cambridge. This play has been played ever since in many schools and theatres in England and abroad and counts as one of Bonds international successes. Bonds other recent partner is French director Alain Franon who premiered In the Company of Men in 1992 and produced an acclaimed version of The War Plays at the Festival d'Avignon in 1994 which re-introduced the work of Bond in France where his plays and theory have since became highly influential. Franon went on promoting Bonds work when he was head of the Thtre National de la Colline in Paris from 1997 to 2010 and with strong support and involvement from Bond, staged there Coffee, The Crime of the 21st Century, Have I None, Born and Chair. Bond dedicated to him and to his actors, People, Innocence, which, following Coffee, The Crime of the 21st Century, he calls The Colline Pentad and considers his major project and this last decade.

During the first half of the 2000s, Bonds work and ideas on drama have known a renewed interest worldwide. In France, he held several conferences before broad audiences and directed many workshops in Paris and elsewhere in France; he was invited for conferences or workshops all over in Europe and America. In the United States, Robert Woodruff and the American Repertory Theatre produced Ollys Prison in 2005; Woodruff also directed Saved (2001) and Chair (2008) at Theatre for a New Audience in New York. In Germany, the interest for his plays has remained high since the seventies.In England too, his plays are now regularly revived in community theatre and in 2008, he knew his first production in the West End in almost fifty years career with Jonathan Kents revival of The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with David Haig and Eileen Atkins. Among recent productions are the revivals of Lear at the Crucible Theatre Sheffield featuring Ian McDiarmid and of Restoration, with added songs, and toured in 2006 by the Oxford Stage Company.

Publications
Since the early 1970s, Bond has been conspicuous as the first dramatist since George Bernard Shaw to produce long, serious prose prefaces to his plays. These contain the author's meditations on capitalism, violence, technology, postmodernism and imagination and develop a comprehensive theory on the use and means of drama. Eight volumes of his Collected Plays, including the prefaces, are available from the UK publisher Methuen. In 1999 he published The Hidden Plot, a collection of writings on theatre and the meaning of drama. He has published two volumes from his notebooks and four volumes of letters. His Collected Poems was published in 1987.

List of works
Plays (dates of writing, followed by director, place and date of world premire, if any)

The Popes Wedding (196162) Keith Johnstone, Royal Court Theatre, London, December 9, 1962 Saved (1964) William Gaskill, English Stage Society, Royal Court Theatre, London, November 3, 1965 Early Morning (196567) William Gaskill, English Stage Society, Royal Court Theatre London, March 31, 1968 Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) Jane Howell, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, June 24, 1968 Black Mass (1970) David Jones, Lyceum Theatre, London, March 22, 1970 Passion a Play for CND (1971) Bill Bryden, au CND Festival of Life on Easter, Alexandra Park Racecourse, April 11, 1971 Lear (196971) William Gaskill, Royal Court Theatre London, September 29, 1971

The Sea a comedy (197172) William Gaskill, Royal Court Theatre London, May 22, 1973 Bingo scenes of money and death (1973) Jane Howell & John Dove, Northcott Theatre, November Exeter, 14 1973 The Fool scenes of bread and love (1974) Peter Gill, Royal Court Theatre London, November 18, 1975 A-A-America !: Grandma Faust a burlesque and The Swing a documentary (1976)Jack Emery, Inter-Actions Ambiance Lunch-Hour Theatre Club, Almost Free Theatre, London. Grandma Faust: October 25; The Swing: November 22, 1976 Stone a short Play (1976) Gerald Chapman, Gay Sweatshop, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, June 8, 1976 The Woman scenes of war and freedom (197477) Edward Bond, National Theatre (Olivier Stage), London, August 10, 1978 The Bundle or New Narrow Road To The Deep North (1977) Howard Davies, Royal Shakespeare Company, The Warehouse Theatre, London, January 13, 1978 The Worlds (1979) Edward Bond, Newcastle University Theatre Society, Newcastle Playhouse, March 8, 1979 Restoration a pastorale (19791980) Edward Bond, Royal Court Theatre, London, July 22, 1981 Summer a European play (198081) Edward Bond, National Theatre (Cottlesloe Stage), London, January 27, 1982 Derek (1982) Nick Hamm, Royal Shakespeare Company, The Other Place, Stratford On Avon, October 18, 1982 Human Cannon (19791983) Dan Baron Cohen, Quantum Theatre, Manchester, February 2, 1986 The War Plays:Red Black and Ignorant (198384) Nick Hamm (as The Unknown Citizen), Royal Shakespeare Company, pour le festival "Thoughtcrimes",Barbican Pit, London, January 19, 1984; The Tin Can People (1984) Nick Philippou, Bread and Circus Theatre, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, May 4, 1984; Great Peace (198485) Nick Hamm, Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Pit, London, July 17, 1985; premiered as a trilogy: Nick Hamm, Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Pit, London, July 25, 1985 Jackets or The Secret Hand (1986) Keith Sturgess, Department of Theatre Studies, University of Lancaster, Nuffield studio, Lancaster, January 24, 1989 In the Company of Men (198788) Alain Franon (as La Compagnie des hommes), Thtre de la Ville, Paris, September 29, 1992 September (1989) Greg Doran, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, September 16, 1989 Ollys prison (1990) (stage version) Jorge Lavelli (as Maison darrt), Festival dAvignon, July 15, 1993 Tuesday (stage version) Claudia Stavisky (as Mardi), Thtre de la Colline, Paris, November 23, 1995 Coffee a tragedy (199394) Dan Baron Cohen, The Rational Theatre Company, Chapter Art Centre, Cardiff, November 27, 1996

At the Inland Sea, a play for young people (1995) Geoff Gillham, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Broadway School, Aston, Birmingham, October 16, 1995 Eleven Vests (199597) Geoff Gillham, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Birmingham, October 7, 1997 The Crime of the twenty-first Century (199698) Leander Haussman (as Das Verbrechen des 21. Jahrhunderts), Schauspielhaus, Bochum, May 28, 1999 The Children (1999) Claudette Bryanston, Classwork Theatre, Manor Community College, Cambridge, February 11, 2000 Have I None (2000) Chris Cooper, Big Brum, Castle Vale Artsite, Birmingham, November 2, 2000 Existence (2002) (stage version) Christian Benedetti, Studio Thtre, Alfortville, October 28, 2002 Born (200203) Alain Franon (as Natre), Festival dAvignon, July 10, 2006 The Balancing Act (2003) Chris Cooper, Big Brum Theatre in Education, Birmingham, October 2003 The Short Electra (2003-4) ?, Young People Drama Festival, March 13, 2004 People (2005), unperformed The Under Room (2005) Chris Cooper, Big Brum Theatre in Education, 9 octobre 2005 Chair, stage version( 2005) Alain Franon (as Chaise) Festival dAvignon, 18 juillet 2006 Arcade (2006) ?, 21 septembre 2006 The Tune (2006) John Doona, 2007 Innocence (2008),unperformed The Window (2009) Chris Cooper, Big Brum Theatre in Education, novembre 2009

Television plays

Ollys Prison, (1990) shot in December 1991, (Roy Battersby) broadcasted: BBC2, May 1993 Tuesday (1992)Shot in March 1993, (Sharon Miller and Edward Bond), broadcasted: BBC Schools Television, June 1993

Radio plays

Chairs (2000), broadcast: BBC Radio 4, April 8, 2000 Existence (2002), broadcast: BBC Radio 4, May 2002