The Child and the Old Man in the Plays of Edward Bond

The Child and the Old Man in the Plays of Edward Bond JOSEPH E. DUNCAN • THE RELATIVELY FEW published studies of Edward Bond show that he is a skillful and self-conscious artist well aware of his own aims, ideas, and methods, and suggest that many aspects of his work remain to be explored.) One of these, central both to his ideas and his dramatic method , is his use ofthe child and the old man as recurring figures. Through their many shifting roles in Bond's five major plays,2 the child and the old man are keys to his depiction of a society after the fall, but one for which there is still an almost irresponsible hope. Bond has described the stoning of the baby in the pram in Saved as a "dramatic metaphor" for the way in which we "batter" children with "the weight of aggression in our society."3 The destruction and corruption of the young is a major theme in Bond's work. The old man may be a victim like the child, the oppressor who helps to victimize the child, or both; the youth may become figuratively identified with the old man. The children in Bond's plays almost always lose their lives or are psychologically injured; those children who become old men usually contribute to the injustice of a fallen society, but sometimes they point the way toward escape or salvation . Bond probably has formulated a social philosophy more systematically than any dramatist since Shaw. In his prefaces and plays he interprets the formation of our present unjust and corrupted society in scientific, chiefly biological, terms. Bond sometimes seems to make contradictory or insufficiently precise statements on the thorny subjects of evolution and human liberty, but the main sweep of his thought is clear. 2 JOSEPH E. DUNCAN The fall, the background of all of Bond's plays, occurs when humans or other animals are forced to live unnaturally, to behave in ways for which they are not designed. They become destructive and neurotic and make bad parents. "That is all there is," Bond says, "to our 'innate' aggression, or our 'original' sin as it was first called."4 Society as a whole experienced such a fall, and new generations of children continue to experience it. Bond's prelapsarian innocence is a time of freedom and justice, without aggression and violence. In innocence, man has physical needs and emotional needs, but not a need for aggression; man has a natural need to love, create, protect and enjoy. One of men's most important original endowments is "their most fundamental desire for justice," or "the basic need for biological justice," and "justice is allowing people to live in the way for which they evolved."5 But this we cannot do; instead, we "live in urban, crowded regimented groups, working like machines (mostly for the benefit of other men), and with no real control of our lives." Paradoxically, an aggressive society has evolved which does not allow individuals to live in the way for which they evolved. Leaders receive privileges and techniques of control are strengthened. Injustice is the consequence, but the organizing group justifies itself through "social morality" and employs fear and violence to establish law and order.6 While Bond laments our loss of a freedom which we apparently once possessed, he concludes that the formation of modem society probably "could not have been avoided." Nevertheless, Bond is basically an optimist: he believes that one can maintain a fundamental innocence, that true "moral understanding" can be improved, and that men can find a "method of change."7 The chain of aggression and violence can be broken. Children are the most vulnerable to these unnatural social conditions which they ultimately tend to perpetuate. "Our society," Bond explains , "has the structure of a pyramid of aggression and as the child is the weakest member it is at the bottom." "Every child," he continues, "is born with certain biological expectations ... that it's [sic] unpreparedness will be cared for, that it will be given not only food but emotional reassurance, that its vulnerability will be shielded .... " But "the weight of aggression" is so heavy that "we batter...