Category Archives: Edward Bond

A short interview with Edward Bond

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Edward Bond.

On Tuesday, 28 February, the Guardian posted the below brief, seven-and-a-half minute interview with British dramatist Edward Bond. Bond and Andrew Dickson discuss his early career, the controversy surrounding Saved, the issue of human justice (and here Bond uncannily echoes the opening line of William Gaddis‘ novel A Frolic of His Own, “Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law”), and whether he could be described as a pessimist. Justice seems to be a continuing theme of writers of Bond’s generation; as Howard Barker wrote in 1986′s “Fortynine asides for a tragic theatre” (and Barker and Bond can’t be said to share the same ideological assumptions), “Because they have bled life out of the word freedom, the word justice attains a new significance. Only tragedy makes justice its preoccupation.” I wrote about Bond and other British playwrights of his generation for the Guardian in 2007; you can find these thoughts here.

Speaking of the generation gap, also at the Guardian, Francis Beckett writes today about the cult of youth in the development and presentation of new writers, suggesting that his own new play The London Spring “speaks to contemporary concerns in a way that a lot of work by younger writers doesn’t.” He concludes: “It’s at least arguable that … MA courses have established a stranglehold over the craft of playwriting; and that this will, in the long run, damage not just the variety of writers, but the variety of the writing.” The full essay is here.

In London, Edward Bond’s Saved

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Bradley Gardner as Barry in the London revival of Edward Bond's Saved. Photo: Simon Kane.

More than a fifth of Superfluities Redux‘ readers come from the United Kingdom; this post is to alert them that the new London revival of Edward Bond’s Saved, which I mentioned last week, has received predictably extreme reviews, both good and bad — testimony to the play’s continuing power. Leo Benedictus, in yesterday’s Guardian, has a round-up of opinion, and Aleks Sierz wrote about the show at his Pirate Dog blog:

What is … important is Bond’s conception of family life as shown by the succession of scenes set in the living room. These are written in different emotional keys: lust, despair, desperation and, finally, a kind of exhausted resignation. The last scene is a study in silence: despite what Bond says, I felt exhausted, but not that anyone had been saved. Here, family life is a boarding house where all members are both hosts and lodgers. It is fuelled by a palpable fury against the poverty of everyday life. What’s particularly striking about this play is how a work of genius makes our usual categories of comprehension so feeble. We call plays relevant, but this is such an inadequate word for Saved; we call plays state-of-the-nation, but this is plainly weak: Saved is a report on modern humanity, it’s about Oedipus in south London. It also exists in a parallel universe to the historical mid-1960s, when it was written: the television is on, but no programmes are recognisable; a radio plays, but not a pirate station; a jukebox is used, but not for the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. No, the play is much bigger than its time: it’s a jewel on the ragged necklace of new writing that stretches from Beckett and Pinter to Cartwright, Crimp and Kane. This is the most important revival of the year.

Saved runs at the Lyric Hammersmith through 5 November. It is unlikely that it will be transmitted to theatres around the world a la the National Theatre’s Live program; I’m sorry I can’t be there. But that shouldn’t stop you.

Saved

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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.

Other places: Edward Bond, Tony Kushner, Vivocraft and more

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Perhaps, as dramatists become older, they become both more laconic and more direct: What can they possibly have to lose? It’s true of Edward Albee (now 82) in his recent interviews; it’s also true of that other Edward, Edward Bond, six of whose plays are being revived during an “Edward Bond Season” at the Cock Tavern Theatre in London. (“All power to the Cock,” says a snickeringly ebullient Lyn Gardner.) An interview with Bond, now 76, appears this week at the BBC Web site, where Bond discusses this “Bond Season” and his own place in the current British theatrical scene:

Why doesn’t my stuff fit in with what happens in UK theatre at the moment? This is because I think UK theatre has abandoned its responsibilities. It’s not appropriate for our times. …  I think the work in the British theatre at the moment is not good and I don’t think people really understand much about the possibilities of theatre. I’m certain they don’t rise to the crisis of drama that we are presented with.

He is even less enamored of the current offerings of television. The entire interview is here; an earlier, undated interview with John Tusa, even more pugnacious (and in which Tusa takes considerable offense), is also available on the BBC Web site.

Bond is not the only playwright to which a theatre has devoted a season; there is also, as we all know, the Tony Kushner season currently underway at the Signature Theatre Company. Recently New York magazine’s Jesse Green took the time to spend a few days with the writer; his profile appears in this week’s issue and is available online here. Green describes the Signature Theatre Kushner season as “hagiographic” and notes its contribution to the “canonization of Saint Tony,” and contributes somewhat to that same hagiography and canonization: “Well, Williams was a pill-popper, O’Neill a drunk, Brecht a womanizer,” Green writes. “By the standard of the modern playwrights in his own pantheon, Kushner really is a saint: the soul of probity, kindness, and social engagement. And though he has certainly lost friends, he seems to have spent his professional life seeking to disprove Auden’s dictum that real artists aren’t nice: ‘All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue.’” On the current administration, Kushner has this to say:

And the LGBT community, what are they, we, looking for? Yes, we’ve been asked to wait a very long time, asked to eat oceans of shit by the Democratic Party; we’ve been 75 percent loyal for decades without a wobble and without a whole lot of help from these people. And it’s important that somebody keeps screaming; the trick is how do you scream, and who do you scream to? If we’re dissatisfied with these Democrats, let’s get better ones instead of fantasies about mass uprisings that are going to resemble the October Revolution. Yes, it might sometimes feel good to throw the newspaper across the room. There’s much criticism of Obama that’s legitimate. He backs down on things, he waffles, like on the mosque, and you wince. And I consider his decision to appeal the Federal court ruling abolishing DADT to be unethical, tremendously destructive, and potentially politically catastrophic. But is Obama really supposed to say, as the first African-American president, that same-sex marriage is his first priority? Clearly he believes in it; he’s a constitutional scholar. It’s not conceivable to me that he believes that state-sponsored marriage should be unavailable to same-sex couples, even if he has religious scruples. But do I think he should have lost the election for the chance to say he supported same-sex marriage? No. Given that we would have had John McCain and Sarah Palin, I would have said, “Say anything you need to.” So if he’s moving very cautiously, with two wars he’s inherited and a collapsing global economy and the planet coming unglued — Okay!

The entire interview is available here. (I’m somewhat surprised the blogosphere hasn’t picked up on this, but there you are.)

Speaking of the dramatic and theatrical blogosphere, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center this coming Monday 25 October, New York picks up where Melbourne left off; on the heels of the Wheeler Center’s “Critical Failure” conference comes “Condition: Critical,” a panel discussion moderated by David Cote (Time Out New York) and featuring comments from Jeffrey Eric Jenkins (the Best Plays yearbook), Claudia La Rocco (WNYC and The New York Times), Rob Weinert-Kendt (American Theatre) and Jason Zinoman (The New York Times). “There’s no denying that blogs, Twitter and shrinking media budgets are taking a toll on this once-honored vocation [theatre criticism],” the Web page for the event offers. “What is the difference between reviewing and criticism? Can online platforms lead to a resurgence of long-form criticism, or can they re-define the triad of artist, critic and audience member? How have the aesthetics of blogs affected the language of criticism? What are new models for creating and disseminating criticism?” To paraphrase Mark Twain, the trouble begins at 6.30pm; admission is free; the Segal Center is at 365 Fifth Avenue in New York.

Finally, in the “Books Received” department, something chilling. In fiction, Dr. Frankenstein and his loyal henchman Igor cheerily exhumed the bodies of the dead for their experiments, but this fiction was based on fact. In his new novel Vivocraft: Letters from a Getman, Eric Saks provides a fantasia of contemporary “resurrectionists,” freelance bodysnatchers now in the pay of the genetic technology industry rather than medical schools; his lead character travels around the world to collect rare genetic material from the living and dead alike. (How much of this fantasia is fantasy and how much truth is for the genetic technology industry to say; Mary Shelley didn’t make it up, either.) Post-Shelley, Saks’ style marries Robert Lewis Stevenson to William S. Burroughs for a freewheeling parody and satire of capitalism and consumerism, infused with a laconic eroticism. Saks promises a multimedia version of the book soon; the print version is now on sale here.