The Political Spectrum of Edward Bond: From Rationalism to Rhapsody

The Political Spectrum of Edward Bond: From Rationalism to Rhapsody CHRISTOPHER INNES The landmarks in contemporary English drama have been more like landmines , shattering conventional expectations, with a whole new configuration of subjects and themes emerging on the stage each time after the dust of public outrage settled. What Look Back in Anger had done for the fifties, Saved did for the sixties, and a play like The Romans in Britain may yet do for the eighties (though Howard Brenton's play seems to lack the qualities that might give its shock effects the same resonance). Like Osborne, Edward Bond achieved immediate prominence through the controversy surrounding his first play to be given a full production, when the Lord Chamberlain tried to throw a baby out with the bath-water. But where Osborne quickly became accepted - partly because his approach was relatively simple and consistent, partly because his plays were recognizably traditional in shape, despite his use of diatribe which shifted dramatic conflict from its conventional locus between characters within the play to a point between his protagonists and the audience - there is still little consensus about Bond. Initially Bond was subjected to perhaps the most violent storm of protest and denigration aimed at any modern dramatist since Ibsen. Indeed , the reaction to Saved paralleled the original English resporise to Ghosts, even down to the vocabulary. Ibsen's "abominable play" had been condemned half a century earlier as "gross, almost putrid indecorum ... literary carrion" (Daily Telegraph) , with "characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent" (Daily Chronicle); in short, "a piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman" (Lloyds). Bond's play was attacked as being "not ... the feeblest thing I have seen on any stage, but ... certainly the nastiest... " (J.C. Trewin, Illustrated London News, 13 Nov. 1965), with "characters who, almost without exception are foul-mouthed, dirty- 190 CHRISTOPHER INNES minded, illiterate and barely to be judged on any recoguizable human level at all" CR. Kretzmer, Daily Express, 4 Nov. 1965). Meanwhile, members of the general public formed pressure groups to mobilize opinion against such pornographic, sadistic, filthy, "unfunny and obscene" plays as Saved.' At first glance this seems an unjustified over-reaction. Babies are slaughtered on stage in revered classical tragedies. Degraded dregs of society had been an accepted focus for serious plays from Gorki's The Lower Depths or BUchner's Woyzeck to Gelber's The Connection. The "kitchen sink" was almost a commonplace in English drama after Osborne. Still, in contrast to the general reaction, leading theatre people and critics like Olivier, Tynan, Bryden, Esslin and Mary McCarthy recognized that Saved was not only strikingly original, but a deeply moral work. And with his truly impressive output of ten full-length plays, four adaptations, an opera and various short pieces in the last fifteen years, Bond is now widely accepted as the single most important contemporary British dramatist . Yet, apart perhaps from The Sea and Bingo, critical acclaim has hardly been matched by popular appreciation. In fact, the most striking thing about the stage history of even his most major work is its relative neglect by the English-speaking theatre. Up to 1977 there were only eighteen productions of Saved and a bare six productions of Lear throughout Britain, the United States, Canada, 'New Zealand and Australia, as compared to fifty-eight and seventeen in other countries' -statistics which can be put into perspective by a further comparison. Within three years of its opening, a play like Peter Shaffer's EqllUS achieved over double the number of productions, and whereas the longest English run of Lear was just over one month, EqUllS was given 131 performances at the Old Vic and ran for over two years on Broadway. Such disparity between Bond's reputation and his public exposure has created what could be called a critical credibility gap. Certainly it raises questions with which few studies of Bond have yet attempted to deal. To some extent, it might be put down to apparent obscurity, since even among those critics who established his reputation there has been little consensus about how his themes should be interpreted. To some...