Edward Bond - From The 1970s To The Mid-1980s: Broaden Scope of Practice and Political Experiments

From The 1970s To The Mid-1980s: Broaden Scope of Practice and Political Experiments

Bond remained a successful playwright in England all through the 1970s, expanding his range of writing and his collaborations. His plays were requested by institutional and community theatres, for premieres and revivals, and he was commissioned to write plays both by renowned institutions and fringe activist companies. For example, in 1976 he wrote, on one hand Stone and A-A-America (pronounced as a sneeze), two agit-prop-style plays, respectively for Gay Sweatshop and the Almost Free Theatre and, on the other, an adaptation of Webster's The White Devil for Michael Lindsay-Hogg to re-open the Old Vic and a libretto for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to open at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden: We Come to the River. (In 1982 the pair collaborated again, less successfully on another opera, The English Cat).

However, Bond's working relationship with the Royal Court progressively slackened, and by the mid 1970s he had found a new partner in the Royal Shakespeare Company. Beginning with Bingo in 1976, the RSC revived and toured his plays regularly until the early 1990s, and Bond, though often disagreeing with the aesthetic choices of its productions or protesting at not being consulted sufficiently, recognized the genuine support the company gave to his work. In 1977 the RSC commissioned a new play for the opening of their new London theatre, the Warehouse, which would be The Bundle. Set in an imaginary medieval Japan and based on an anecdote from the classical Japanese poet Bashō, the play shows an eventually successful revolution whose leader nevertheless constantly faces the human cost of political change and experiences as futile an ideology of compassion, being (in Bond's view) politically counterproductive and supportive of reactionary violence.

Bond assigned the same political concern to his next play, The Woman, set in a fantasy Trojan War and based on Euripides' Trojan Women. Comparable to Lear, it shows the fight of the decayed Trojan queen, Hecuba, against the Athenian empire, succeeding only when she abandons the aristocracy and the interests of the state to physically meet the proletariat and join the people's cause.

In 1977, Bond accepted an Honorary Doctorate by Yale University (though thirty years before he was not allowed to sit for his eleven-plus examination) and he began to take up students workshops in Newcastle, Durham and Birmingham, for which he wrote several plays. The most accomplished among them was The Worlds, written for the Newcastle University Theatre Society, based on the recent events in the UK, both the Northern Ireland conflict and the social crisis of the winter of Discontent.

His early 1980s plays were directly influenced by the coming to power of the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher and the profound social changes they were bringing about. Restoration, as a half-musical parody of Restoration comedies, deals with working class support for the Tories by showing a servant accepting his conviction and eventual execution for a murder committed by his cynical and silly master. Summer deals with the moral ambiguities of capitalism through the conflict of two women in socialist Yugoslavia. One is the daughter of former landlords, whose compassionate nature doesn’t prevent them being exploiters and collaborationists during the German occupation. The other, the daughter of servants, rejects the values of the former, who she once saved from a firing squad. Derek, written for a youth festival, alludes directly to the Falklands war and shows an idiotic aristocrat stealing the brain of a gifted worker and sending him to die in a war in a country that "sounds like the name of a disease".