A 1984 production of Edward Bond's Saved.
In yesterday’s Guardian, Maddy Costa discusses Edward Bond’s Saved, the controversial classic that is now receiving its first professional London revival in three decades at the Lyric Hammersmith. Costa talks to many of the principals involved in both the original 1965 Royal Court production as well as this new staging of a play particularly notorious for its violent on-stage murder of a baby in a pram. Bond himself reports that he permitted the new production to go forward because he “was actually pointing to the future” in the play. “The future is now here,” he observes:
Bond … believes people [who saw the original production] were most disturbed by an accusation that lay beneath the surface of the play: that the violence of Auschwitz and Hiroshima was not locked in the past but embedded in the fabric of British society, ready to erupt from a frustrated underclass. “I wanted to show that we are destructive of human values,” he says. “The people who are killing the baby are doing it to gain their self-respect, because they want to assert human values.” …
[What] Bond exposes in Saved is our capacity to deny the violence in human nature – the kind of violence Bond saw evidence of in Coventry just a few years ago, when he heard a parent say to a child: “If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you.”
I am quite willing to wager that this is one of those West End productions that most definitely won’t make it to Broadway in the theatre next to that of The Lion King or Wicked. The excellent Guardian article is available in full here.
I first heard about the stoning the baby scene when I was in drama school back in the eighties. The graduating actors were doing an Edward Bond play for their final production. I watched the show with a certain perverse anticipation, however the show ended and no babies had been stoned. I lingered around the foyer thinking perhaps it was only intermission but other students assured me that the play was in fact over and that no babies had ever been stoned in The Sea. I’d quite enjoyed the play but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. The following year another group of students were doing a production of Bond’s Summer. Sure I had the right play on this occasion I dutifully went along. My heart began to sink about halfway through as it was pretty clear no babies were going to be stoned in this play either. I remember expressing my frustration at having seen two Bond plays with that false expectation to another ex-student. He told me that the baby stoning scene occurs in Narrow Road to the Deep North. This threw me even more as I’d seen two student production of Narrow Road and – while I confess to occasionally falling asleep in the theatre – I was pretty damn sure I wouldn’t have missed any babies being stoned. About five years later I saw a copy of Saved in a second hand book shop and figured that it had to be the right play. Later that night I read the famous scene. I can’t say I responded to it in the way Bond might’ve intended or hoped, but sometimes it’s a relief to have your expectations met.