ARTicles vol. 3 i.3a: Edward Bond and the Morality of Violence

“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners,” Edward Bond confessed. Graphic violence runs through Bond’s plays, but he uses it to provoke self-awareness, not shock. “Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence.” Edward Bond was born on July 18, 1934, to a working class family in London, and childhood memories of World War II bombings color his work. When Winston Churchill announced the peace, Bond remembers a voice in his head saying, “Now you will live.” Since Bond found the education poor and the limitations placed on him by his class oppressive, he left school at fifteen. “The working-class survived through self-repression. They enforced it on each other by scorn and guilt,” he says. Thus, class struggle and economic hardship suffuse Bond’s work. “I have the strengths of my class and am not dismayed by its weaknesses. I am true to it when I write.” In 1958 Edward Bond joined the first writers’ group at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Founded in 1956 by George Devine, the Royal Court promoted challenging and subversive writing. Their production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 heralded a shift in British drama towards a harsh aesthetic that Bond would push further. When the Royal Court produced Bond’s Saved in 1965, a scandal erupted. Saved tells the story of youths, who, suppressed by a brutal economic system, become monsters. Since the sixteenth century, plays for production were subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s approval, although a loophole in the Licensing Act of 1737 allowed for private performances of unapproved plays, enabling London audiences to see Ibsen’s Ghosts, Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Among the many excisions the Lord Chamberlain demanded to Saved was the stoning to death of a baby in its carriage. Bond refused to alter a word, claiming that removing this pivotal scene would destroy the play. The Royal Court agreed, and so they became a temporary, members-only club, producing Saved as the “English Stage Society.” The Lord Chamberlain prosecuted the English Stage Society, the first club to be arrested for producing a banned play. Despite a passionate defense from Laurence Olivier, then Artistic Director of the National Theatre, the court found the English Stage Society guilty and given a “conditional discharge” that promised severe consequences if they attempted to cross the Lord Chamberlain again. But the Lord Chamberlain was not the only opponent of Saved. Critics called it “revolting and distasteful,” and fistfights broke out in the theatre. When Penelope Gilliatt, The Observer’s critic, praised it for showing “the bottom end of human possibility” she received torn programs and a newspaper photograph depicting her own child beheaded and smeared in red ink. Gilliatt responded, “The objectors deny, with frightening violence, that such violence exists.” The next Bond play the Royal Court produced was Early Morning (1967), a surreal satire on state power that featured a lesbian-cannibal Queen Victoria, who kills Prince Albert and has an affair with Florence Nightingale. This time the Lord Chamberlain returned the play with a note that read, “This play may not be performed.” William Gaskill, the Royal Court’s Artistic Director, produced the play as a private performance again, but to avoid the notice of the censor, he scheduled the play for the evening but performed it in the afternoon for a selected audience who were informed of the change via last minute phone calls. By 1968, due to pressure from both left and right constituents and a concern that continuing persecution would result in a decline in the quality of drama, Parliament abolished theatrical censorship. Bond continued to provoke the British establishment. He dismantled Shakespeare’s King Lear, rewriting it as Lear in 1971, and in Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (1973) he depicted Shakespeare as a rapacious capitalist who signs away the rights of his tenants (historically true). The point of the play was not to slander the Bard, but to ponder a writer’s responsibility to society. According to Bond, “If you are an unjust person, it doesn’t matter how cultured you are, how civilized you are, how capable you are of producing wonderful sayings, wonderful characters, wonderful jokes, you will destroy yourself. And so, a writer, nowadays, has to put the cards on the table for the public, and say: ‘These are the consequences of your life; they are inescapable. If you want to escape violence, you don’t say ‘violence is wrong,’ you alter the conditions that create violence.’ ” Bond addressed an even more political subject in The War Plays (1985), a trilogy about the catastrophe of nuclear war. The plays grew out of an improvisation Bond conducted at the University of Palermo in Sicily in which he asked the students to imagine themselves as soldiers given the choice of killing a stranger or their own brother. All the students chose their brother. Bond was intrigued by this paradox, and he integrated the improvised scene into the third play of the trilogy, The Great Peace. The question of what to do in extreme circumstances and what that means to our humanity, infuses all of Bond’s work. “The War Plays and Bingo are plays that try to size up these problems … Animals are determined by their instincts; humans are determined by the way they define the world. It was St. Augustine who said: ‘Love and do what you will.’ Himmler said: I gassed the Jews out of love.’ That is a paradox which is essential to the survival of the human species. It provides us with a new definition of mankind.” Because Bond sees theatre as an instrument of change, his work defies current theatre’s increasingly commercial standards. He shares a tense, off-again on-again relationship with the two pre-eminent London theatres, The National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and even the Royal Court, all of whom he believes trivialize theatre. Nevertheless, he has been an inspiration to many young British writers today, such as the late Sarah Kane, whose play Blasted (also produced by the Royal Court), generated a critical outcry not heard since Bond’s own Saved thirty years earlier. “You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama,” he once said. “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 Theatre Royal… If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theatre, you’ll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself.” Bond wrote Olly’s Prison as a teleplay in 1993 in response to the end of the Cold War. “This event was a great relief for me because, if you’re a socialist, people say ‘go to Russia’ and you have to take them through the argument that Stalinism is not your idea of socialism. I realized that we had been basing a lot of our drama on the idea that a socialist society existed. I found that what I needed to ask in talking about our pseudo-democracy was ‘where are the prisons in our society?’ We don’t have the gulags but I needed to find some way of making the prisons declare themselves. That was the strategy of the play, to make repression expose itself.” The title, Olly’s Prison refers not to a literal fortress of barred windows and concrete, but the machinations of a system that abuses the working poor, keeping them in a state of torpor. Olly could be the child of any of the toughs in Saved, and Bond has carefully chosen his name to reflect the universality of his story. “He’s a matchstick man,” Bond says. “an O for the head, two L’s for arms, an inverted Y for legs. It means Everyman. It’s everybody’s prison. That for me is a pseudo-democracy.” Kirsten Bowen is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./MXAT School Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.