|
|
Edward Bond Born in July 1934, the son of Cambridgeshire spoon-moulders who had moved
to London in search of work, Edward Brook Bond grew up a witness to the
harshness of Britain's undeniable class divides. From his earliest days he
viewed life in its political context. He remembers seeing a woman canvassing
for Churchill in 1945 and knowing even then that 'the class structure was
dangerous and vicious.' On a school theatre visit he saw a performance of
'Macbeth' given by Donald Wolfit, and felt a powerful connection with the
dramatic form as a means of expressing his fears and investigating his
concerns, but it was his military service with the Allied Army of Occupation,
described by him as 'a sort of parodied...corrupt form of society' which
formalised his political views and gave him the impetus to begin writing in
earnest. Bond's entrance into British theatre on his return from Vienna coincided
with a new wave of British play-writing, centred around the English Stage
Company's recently aquired 'Old Court Theatre.' The theatre and its active
Writer's Group fostered the revolutionary talents of such new faces as John
Arden and John Osborne, staging the original production of the seminal Look
back in Anger, and aquiring a reputation for presenting shocking or
subversive material. Bond too ran into trouble with the Lord Chamberlain's
censorship office, particularly over his graphic portayal of poverty-induced
domestic violence in Saved (1965) which culminates in the stoning to death of
a baby in its pram by a dehumanised gang of perfectly plausible thugs. His
depiction of Queen Victoria as a canabalistic lesbian in Early morning
(1968), a satire on Edwardian and Victorian morality, was so divisive as to
prompt the final demise of the obsolete censorship office. Constantly in search of new influences, the visit of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble to London in August 1956 was formative, the company's hallmarks evident throughout his work, but constantly under re-evaluation. Dissatisfied with straight alienation effects and realising that 'sometimes it is necessary to emotionally commit the audience', Bond pioneered the 'aggro effect,' most notably employed in Lear (1971) which sharply heightens dramatic tension before precisely targeted moments of alienation. It is this masterful sensitivity to dramatic form and his ability to redefine established modes which makes his work so engaging, and prevent his passionately-held Marxist ideals from generating tub-thumping agit-prop melodrama. We may no longer live in self delusional ignorance of an impending nuclear holocaust, and the touchy-feely nineties may have softened views of an opressive totalitarian state, but ours is a society in which the class war continues to rage and the tensions of ever-growing economic divisions undermine the cosy complacency which the greater part of british culture preserves. Reading or seeing Bond's work provokes a recognition that transcends its specific historical and cultural context. Accutely aware of its responsibility to educate and inform, it is able to confidently answer in the affirmative the question posed by the dramatised Shakespeare in Bingo (1973); 'was anything done?' |
|