The Woman and Greek Myth: Bond's Theatre of History

The Woman and Greek Myth: Bond's Theatre of History JAMES C. BULMAN "I have represented history as a woman with a sword under her skirt," I Edward Bond believes that mythology always serves an unjust 'society. It codifies and promulgates the values of a repressive culture - in his tenns synonymous with capitalist culture. "Capitalism," he writes in an essay called "A Rational Theatre," "does not want to know what we are but merely how we may be manipulated. To this end it creates a mythology about men and their societies. This mythology is its culture.,,2 And what are these myths? In another' essay Bond lists them: "the world is a jungle, men are animals, some men are more animal than others, all men are born to sin or with the need to be violent, .only the hard prosper, most men wish to be led, happily others are born to be their leaders, and all this is either chosen by god or ordained by evolution.'" Bond thinks that such myths are irrational, and furthennore, that they license irrational behavior. It is the obligation of a rational theatre, therefore, to demystify and revise these myths. "Theatre," he argues, "must talk of the causes ofhuman misery and the sources of human strength. It must make clear how and why the culture of capitalism is a nihilism. And because the understanding of history is contamiriated with mythology it must rewrite it to make sense of the future.'" The crucial word here is history; for history, unlike myth, "teaches a truth that cannot be opposed by will." Historical truth, Bond writes, "like the physical laws of nature - comes from the foundations. True culture is created there, not at the top."s Bond's sense of history, then, is profoundly socialist, rooted in the working class experience. Terry Eagleton observes that the political orientation of Bond's Prefaces is Marxist, only Bond tends to sentimentalize class struggle and the evolutionary nature of social development in the manner of "an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalis!."· Indeed, Bond defines socialism as "The rational interpretation and understanding of 506 JAMES C. BULMAN men, society and history;"? and as such, it "has no need of mythology.'" It does, however, have need of"new artistic forms to create a new image of men and women," for "writers can create art only by working to create this rational culture.'" Rational theatre thus becomes, for Bond, a medium through which socialism may express its ideals. It must teach; it must expose myth as a means by which capitalism keeps us in thrall; it must draw "its methods and values from the understanding of the history of all men.,,'D He calls it the "theatre of history."II It is not surprising, then, that Bond should look to the myths ofour culture as sources for his plays. Yet his plays are so permeated with those myths that he appears, paradoxically, to be half in love with those artifacts of a culture whose ideology he abhors. The myth of King Lear, for example, long possessed Bond's imagination: for him, it distilled the evils of a totalitarian society. In his own Lear, he abstracted the political elements of Shakespeare's play - the king's blindness to social injustice, the violence, the militarism - then wrote a new ending wherein Lear, having come to recognize human need, turns activist (even in old age) and begins to tear down the wall he has built around his kingdom. Shortly after Lear, Bond began work n The Woman. The first new play to be performed on the National Theatre's Olivier stage, The Woman opened in August, 1978; and its aims were even more ambitious than those of Lear. In it, Bond attempted both to demystify and to reconstitute the history of western civilization. To encapsulate that history, he turned to the most classic of myths, the Trojan War. Bond spent two holidays on Malta, soaking himself "in the Mediterranean background" and steeping himself in Greek literature - tragedy, comedy, epic;12 and the play that emerged from his reading is epic in every sense. It dramatizes the fall of Troy in bold, Brechtian strokes. "An epic play," asserts...