ARTicles vol. 3 i.3a: Bond on Bond

“Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic – Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism. So the aim of Olly’s Prison is to show how violence secretes itself – and hides within – the ordinary social. It breaks out – as American treatment of Iraqi prisoners shows. Olly’s Prisontries to force the violence in ordinary daily life to reveal itself. It’s politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas. Genes merely make possible, ideas decide.” – letter to director Robert WoodruffArt is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society. I’m not interested in an imaginary world. I’m interested in the real world. And in fact, of course, all things that I put on the stage are understatements. – interview with Karl-Heinz Stoll, Interviews with Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1976)I am not in a political party (inevitably I must add, nor was Brecht) – because I think that rightly carries a specific obligation, that you should as a writer express the particular party line – which I wouldn’t mind doing, but as a writer I want to always spend my limited time, energy, and resources on asking the most fundamental questions: Why politics? Why is Auschwitz ‘wrong’? (or Why not Auschwitz) Why does humanness matter? Why not robotize ourselves? (which in fact we can’t do, but why can’t we do it?) – unpublished personal letterMy plays are not particularly violent, actually. There are often violent things in them, and when they occur, then I depict them as truthfully and honestly as I think one should. But I’m not interested in violence for the sake of violence. Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs. Violence is the problem that has to be dealt with. – interview with Karl-Heinz Stoll, Interviews with Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1976)Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human. The unconscious sees through us and our social corruption and sends us messages of our humanity, ingeniously and persistently trying to reconcile the divisive tensions in our lives. Our unconscious makes us sane; it is only in an insane society that our unconscious colludes in insanity.” – Commentary on the War Plays“The raids had not come. We were sent home in time for them – the blitz. I was bombed night after night after night. I dreaded the coming darkness. The siren. A long silence. Then the background hum and rumble. The pock-pock-pock and crash of guns. The searchlights raised like fingers beseeching the sky. Then the bombs fell. A thin even whine from far away. Then a juddering rush – a roaring crammed into a small space – an explosion of pure noiseless sound – passed through you and into the earth. Already the next thin whistle had started. This one must hit you. It cannot be so close and not hit you. Each time. It lifted up the top of your head as if it was a lid and jumped inside. In the morning we collected shrapnel in the street. There was a lot. Heavy and jagged…On the last day of war we ran to the sweet shop. We thought rationing was over. The sweetshop owner shouted. He accused us of not using our ration coupons at his shop in the war and now we expected to wallow in luxury. Anyway rationing wasn’t over. I went home. On the radio Churchill announced peace. A voice in my head told me ‘So you will live.’ We thought violence was at an end. Not even adults would be so foolish again. Later when bombs were dropped in the first Gulf War I spoke at a peace rally. I used an obscenity. I hadn’t intended to. I’d never spoken obscenely before in public. The word spoke itself. It was an after-shock from forty years before. I do not remember the sound of bombs. If I close my eyes and listen I hear it. In all its baroque horror. If I did not hear it I would have lost my self. It was my soul that swore.” – From “Something of Myself”I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it’s my way of making the world rational to me. – interview with Karl-Heinz Stoll, Interviews with Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1976)“I want to sum up my rejection of Brecht. Of course he meant very well. He is at fault by commission and omission – the public use of his dramas has become an empty pretence. It stultifies radical drama and – as opposition – leads to empty theatres of outrage and effect. He belongs to western capitalism. He is part of the culture of linear thinking, of cure. This now dominates societies. It has obvious justifications and is technically adroit. But we are not in the world to be good but to change it. We change it because we become the symptoms of the need of change. If you destroy the symptoms you destroy change. What is a symptom of the need of change – and what just of the indifference of the universe? You need to understand how the mind works – and then you can understand the meaning of actions when you relate them to their situations. (Which is the programme of drama.) You need to understand that humanness is created. Otherwise you will be curing us of our humanness. In the last century this happened in isolated places. The possibilities of it happening increase. This is because of the penetrative power of modern technology, the necessity of administration, and the psychological deformations caused when a species which bears the human imperative lives in increasingly unjust and dangerous ways, so that its imperative to justice turns into the lust of revenge. Then we cease to create humanness. But when we lose humanness we have no way of knowing we have lost it. Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur. When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost. Only the trivial differences remain. One group is dead but moves. There will be no social difference between the dentist’s chair and the gas chamber. That seems over-stated. Of course.” – Edward Bond in a letter to David Allen, December 18, 2004“You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama. The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies. They were told the best thing was not to have been born, but, if that misfortune struck them, the next best thing was to die young. And they all said, ‘Hurrah,’ and went down to their city rejoicing. Why? Because they’d faced the extreme situation, not at Auschwitz but at the Theater Royal.” – Edward Bond, the New York Times, February 18, 2001