Edward Bond, who has died aged 89, was an outstanding dramatist who wrote greater than 50 performs, lots of which helped change the face of latest theatre. If, in his later years, he was extra honoured overseas than within the UK, it was for a wide range of causes.
One was his personal intransigence, which led him to fall out with lots of the main theatrical establishments. One other was that his self-declared mission to confront audiences with “the disaster within the human species” discovered extra prepared hearers in France and Germany than at residence. But he stays one of many nice post-second world conflict dramatists.
Bond, who was ultimately awarded an honorary doctorate by Yale College, had little formal training and left college at 15. He was drawn to theatre by seeing Donald Wolfit play Macbeth and by watching music-hall performances on the theatre the place his sister labored. However he had a rare sense of his personal future. He started writing brief tales throughout nationwide service, which he loathed, and as soon as informed me: “I knew roughly the place I used to be going from the beginning.”
He gravitated naturally to London’s Royal Courtroom and it was there, between 1962 and 1974, that he wrote what has proved to be his most sturdy work. Championed by William Gaskill, who directed most of his early performs, Bond unflinchingly confronted social injustice and inevitably sparked controversy. In Saved (1965), which included a scene of a child being stoned to loss of life, he handled the cultural and emotional deprivation that lay behind acts of senseless violence. His subsequent play Early Morning (1968) was banned outright by the theatrical censor, the Lord Chamberlain: whether or not as a result of it implied that Queen Victoria loved a lesbian relationship with Florence Nightingale or due to its Swiftian picture of conspicuous consumption resulting in cannibalism was open to query.
However, though Bond’s early performs contained a excessive quotient of violence, he was neither a sensation-seeker nor a despairing nihilist. Lear (1971) was primarily based on Shakespeare’s play and, whereas containing spectacular cruelties like its template, was additionally a plea for the potential for change in society. That theme additionally emerged in The Sea (1973), which was Bond’s wittiest play, had echoes of The Tempest and, once more, implied it was as much as us to assist create a saner world. Having derived two performs from Shakespeare, Bond turned to the person himself in Bingo (1973) which, for many people, stays his most interesting work.
It’s one which poses a robust query. How may the dramatist who wrote so feelingly in King Lear about “poor bare wretches” in his closing years as a wealthy Stratford landowner have signally did not help the dispossessed? Memorably performed at completely different instances by Bob Peck, John Gielgud and Patrick Stewart, Bond’s Shakespeare was an unforgettable portrait of the artist as an outdated man, confronting his ineffectualness in mitigating the world’s cruelty. I as soon as requested Bond if he put to himself the identical query his model of Shakespeare confronted: “Was something completed?” Bond thought a very long time earlier than answering: “All I can do is write one of the best performs I can and preserve describing actuality as I see it.”
Bond continued to jot down highly effective theatrical parables in The Idiot (1974), coping with the insanity of John Clare, and Restoration (1981) which, additionally set in 18th-century East Anglia, confirmed how justice was each man’s proper however a caste system’s plaything. However that manufacturing led to disagreements with the Royal Courtroom’s creative director, Max Stafford-Clark, and signalled Bond’s growing alienation from mainstream establishments.
In 1985, he walked out of rehearsals of The Struggle Performs on the RSC out of frustration with the actors’ stylistic habits. More and more, Bond regarded elsewhere for the manufacturing of his performs. He turned strongly allied to a Birmingham-based training firm, Large Brum, which premiered lots of his later performs. He additionally discovered nice favour in France, the place the Avignon competition and Théâtre Nationwide de la Colline in Paris devoted complete seasons to him.
Bond did a lot different work. He wrote more and more polemical prefaces to his performs after the style of Bernard Shaw. He additionally wrote poems, opera libretti and contributed to the screenplays for plenty of movies together with Blow Up, Laughter within the Darkish and Walkabout. However it’s for his performs he can be remembered. In Saved, Lear, The Sea and Bingo he confronted poverty, insanity, injustice, dehumanisation and the travails of the artistic artist in language that was spare, lean, poetic and resonant.
He might have became what Peter Corridor termed a “proud misanthrope” inhabiting his rural Cambridgeshire residence like a latterday Timon of Athens. However, if British theatre did not accommodate him or to satisfy his strict calls for, the loss was ours in addition to his and one of the best of his work will certainly survive.
