Edward Bond: An Interview

Edward Bond: An Interview HILDE KLEIN "It is the responsibility of a writer to be an artist, not a propagandist~ and to tell the social, historical and political truth as simply as possible." The following interview with Edward Bond took place in the summerhouse located in the garden of his cottage in rural Cambridgeshire some years ago. During the interview I was overwhelmed by the author's extraordi.nary personality and humanity; he spoke so extensively, with great seriousness, conviction and concentration, that I hardly dared to interrupt his powerful torrent of thoughts to pose my questions. In prefaces to his plays, essays, and articles the author has often lost himself in theories on his playwriting goals - to change society and improve the world. Here Bond defines with great clarity his new ideas on the history and function of theatre; and, in addition, he explains his latest achievements in theatre technique which are of great interest. Therefore I esteem his comments as . a valuable contribution to the understanding of his dramaturgy and indeed, an indispensable complement to his recent theoretical writings on his theatre. In 1990 Methuen Drama published Bond's so-called Two Post-Modern Plays, lackets & In the Company of Men with September and Notes on PostModernism . In the Notes the author talks about the relationship between people , technology, and authority in post-modernity and the way in which theatre and other arts are part of that relationship. In 1991 a revised edition by Methuen Drama of Bond's trilogy The War Plays (Red, Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People, Great Peace) appeared in one volume, with a long and profound Commentary on which he had worked for the last three years. (The plays were first published as two separate Methuen Paperback originals in 1985.) In the Commentary Bond again expresses his ideas about the meaning of drama in our society; he also reveals his thoughts about the technique he developed in The War Plays. (During the interview he let slip that he is working on a book which deals with the history of drama, the skills it requires and its objectives). Bond has stated that his trilogy The War Plays sums up all his previous work. Asked in the interview to comment on this, he explained that the plays Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 408 Bond: An Interview 409 can be regarded as the history of theatre, because he uses various devices from very simple theatre to a "camera theatre" to achieve a certain end. Each play repeats and varies events from the other plays and, together, they give a full vision of the situation after a nuclear disaster. While The War Plays are projected into the future to show where abuse of power and irresponsible behaviour might lead us to, plays such as Early Morning ([968), Narrow Road to the Deep North ([968), Lear ([97[), The Sea ([973), Bingo (1973), The Fool (1975), The Bundle (1978), The Womall (1978), Restoration (198[), Summer (1982), and Human Cannon (1985), have either a historical or a symbolic atmosphere. The author has always pointed to the need to understand and to interpret rationally our past in order to use the experiences in OUT present and not to repeat the mistakes committed . Some of Bond's works have a contemporary setting, as The Pope's Wedding ([962), the polemical play Saved (1965), and The Worlds (1981), and always, over the past thirty years, he has concentrated on social injustice , individual alienation, violence, and corruption, caused by a class-structured , technocratic society and has indic,ated the urgent need to react and to create a better world. The playwright has unceasingly experimented with various dramatic forms; his work is related to his preoccupation to find an effective medium to express the serious issues raised in his drama. From The War Plays onwards he has developed a new device - Theatre Events, or TEs - used to exploit an incident , a scene or sequence to illustrate the meaning of happenings that occur in the world and to tell the social truth about them. As Bond has stated: the story will point to cause and effect, but not to meaning. Thus, TEs provide the analysis of the...