Edward Bond: A Critical Study

P. Billingham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137368010
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This new study of one of Britain's greatest modern playwrights represents the first major, extended discussion of Edward Bond's work in over twenty years. The book combines rigorous and stimulating analysis and discussion of Bond's plays and ideas about drama and society. For the first time, there is also discussion of selected plays from his later, post-2000 period, including Innocence and Have I None, alongside explorations of widely studied plays such as Saved.

1

Your Morality is Violence: Politicising the Past

Edward Bond made the following entry dated 2 July 1970 in his notebook: ‘In a capitalist society, crime makes an honest man of you’ (Bond, 2000c, p. 106). In this chapter I shall explore a series of plays spanning from 1971 to 1981, through which Bond revisited aspects of Britain’s social, cultural and political past. It is possible that Bond aimed to investigate and expose the political conflicts and sea change of what was a tumultuous period of social and economic upheaval. This is not, however, to offer a deductive and narrowly singular reading of these complex and important plays. The four plays that constitute the narrative spine of this chapter therefore are, in chronological order, Lear(1971), Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (1973), The Fool: Scenes of Bread and Love (1975) and Restoration (1981).

Some of Bond’s most powerful work in the first 20 years of his writing career came in the 1970s, a time of political unrest and activism leading up to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979. This was a decade of mass oppositional left-wing political activity. This was particularly so in industrialised northern England and focused upon the major miners’ strikes. It was a period which saw the final years of Harold Wilson’s Labour administration which had first been elected to power in 1964. In 1970 Wilson called a ‘snap’ (sudden) election fully expecting to win against a weakened Conservative Party and Shadow Cabinet led by the seemingly unpopular Edward Heath. In fact Heath was elected and Labour would not return to power until 1974 after Heath’s economic policies arguably created more social and economic unrest. The new Conservative government pursued a policy of confronting the unions and their political and economic power against the backdrop of an international crisis in oil prices. In 1971 there was a strike of 280,000 British miners. Power stations were targeted with secondary strike action and in 1973 the second strike provoked Edward Heath’s Conservative government into declaring a State of Emergency. This resulted in the forced introduction of a three-day working week in order to conserve energy resources.

This was also the decade in British politics when the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland underwent a traumatic transformation. From what had been presented by the government and mainstream media as a ‘benign’ occupation of British troops to ‘protect’ a politically and economically vulnerable Catholic community, a tragic transformation occurred. Provoked by a scenario which escalated with appalling rapidity into effectively a state of war following the tragedy of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1972, and through a dark deployment of Orwellian ‘double-speak’, this violent conflict between the British state and the Irish Catholic people became referred to in public discourse as ‘The Troubles’. Bond’s engagement with some of the major political events of that era may be seen in shorter plays such as Black Mass (1970) and Passion (1971). Reflecting Bond’s willingness at this time to write a form of agit-prop drama for specific political purposes and contexts, both plays were written for two organizations with clear political aims and strategies. These were respectively the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In the short provocative piece commissioned by the AAM a small but interesting footnote in modern British theatre history occurred, with Bond himself playing the part of Christ in the opening performance of Black Mass. This remains the sole occasion in which Bond appeared in his own work – albeit a non-speaking part.

With Lear (1971) EdwardBond produced one of his lifelong, landmark achievements as a dramatist. In this work, Bond’s dramatic and political vision challenges, with profound implications, the nature of totalitarian power enforced by state-authorised violence. It also, with equivalent power and resonance, interrogates the central tenets of the genres of classical and neo-classical Renaissance dramatic tragedy. In doing so, in his radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear,Bond challenges the concept of a passive, fatalistic catharsis underpinning conventional dramatic tragedy. That is, that human suffering must and will happen and reflects and embodies an inherently fractured, unchangeable human condition. This biological and existential stasis has violence as its gravitational force. In his Preface to Plays: 2 he wrote:

Violence shapes and obsesses our society and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence. (Bond, 1978, p. 3)

As Hirst also identifies:

Lear is a play about revolution. It is also a play about violence. Though the two themes are complementary they are not synonymous, and it may be that the excessive amount of realistic physical violence in this play – far more than in any of Bond’s previous dramas [...] considerably alienated reviewers and public alike when the play was first performed. (Hirst, 1985, p. 132)

The question that Hirst’s comments raise of a play’s capacity to alienate public response through its depiction and use of violence is important. It necessitates examining the relationship between a work of art as a cultural product with its dialectical inscription of its ideological conditions of production. The politically manipulated, mediated representation and reporting of such atrocities as ‘Bloody Sunday’ effectively seeks to anaesthetise public perception of those events. In the context of the tragic events in Derry it provoked many more years of armed struggle and tragic loss of combatant and civilian lives. It was to be nearly 40 years after the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ before a more complete and complex truth could be presented following the Saville Inquiry. Finally published in 2010 after a 12-year period since its formation, the Inquiry’s report condemned the actions of the British troops.

The fundamental question of what form of dramaturgy is most effective and appropriate to explore and expose such political violence, and the ethical issues arising from it, seems to have preoccupied Bond over the course of his writing career. It is a question with which I believe he continues to struggle with characteristically unflinching honesty and rigour. In the early and mid seventies when Lear and Bingo were being written and produced, Bond began to further question the ideological and methodological efficacy of Brechtian dramaturgy, talking instead in terms of his concept of ‘Rational Theatre’.

For Bond at this period the notion of the ‘rational’ arguably carried a clear connotation of his then Marxist interpretation of society, culture, economy and history:

An artist cannot create art, cannot demonstrate his objective truth, in the service of reaction or fascism; because art is not merely the discovery of new truth or new aspects of old truth – but also of the human need for the rational [...] Art isn’t the discovery of particular truths in the way science is; it also demonstrates the practical working out of the human need for truth. (Bond, 1978, p. xv)

Further on in thisIntroduction to Plays: 2, Bond looks to differentiate and discuss some of the ideological and methodological differences between Brecht’s concept of the ‘alienation effect’ with his own emerging dramaturgy:

Brecht was against undue empathy; but there is a proper empathy in the love of truth. Drama embodies human experience into its descriptions of history. We are ourselves because we are also history [...] To talk of objectivity in Brecht’s sense may well be misleading. Dramatists can’t treat their experiments as scientists treat theirs because the experimentation – as much as the struggle and effort outside the theatre – is an event in human life and history. Society is a surgeon operating on himself and art is part of that operation. (Bond, 1978, p. xv)

In the four plays of this period under discussion one sees Bond exploring the political and ethical tensions between the individual and a repressive state. In the case of the character Lear, the oppressor transforms into the oppressed. In Bingo and The Fool,the focus is upon the compromised writer. With Restoration,Bond uses Bob, Rose and Bob’s mother as the generic class-based victims of a profoundly reactionary eighteenth-century English governing culture. Significantly, however, as I discuss later in this chapter, it is Rose alone who understands the politics of her class’s oppressed condition and seeks to challenge it. There is evidence throughout Bond’s dramaturgy of his interrogation of repressive political systems employing violence as a means of sustaining their vested power and self-interest. However, in direct tandem with this rational analysis of political struggle, is a complex, non-sentimental empathy – if not compassion – for those who are the victims of violence. But this is never a simplistic binary in Bond’s writing, and in Lear, especially, the origins of violence and its oppressive impact are explored across and within the oppressor and the oppressed. This is especially the case in Bond’s dramatic treatment of Lear, his two daughters and, finally, Cordelia the revolutionary leader.

Lear (1971)

Reviewing Lear for The Times on30 September 1971, Irving Wardle was full of praise for the play and production, reflecting the turnaround in critical reception of Bond’s work at this period, following the initial and widely shared denunciation of Saved:

Lear [...] wanders the country in ragged incognito, witnessing Goya-like enormities which befall those who do him small acts of kindness [...] Bond himself has not changed; and we have no other playwright remotely like him. (Qtd in Roberts, 1985, p. 23)

In an interview in the Performing Arts Journal in 1976, Bond talked about why he had felt the overwhelming need to revisit Shakespeare’s outstanding tragedy on his own terms:

The reason I took Lear is that as a myth it seems central to people’s experience. Lear is the family tragedy, magnified to the dimensions of political tragedy, state tragedy, and it seems to deal with very fundamental desires and fears that people have. It’s a fascinating play [...] and I felt that somehow I wasn’t living in the real world until I dealt with that myth on my own terms [...] I think it’s the greatest play written, and it’s the play I get the most out of. Nevertheless, it doesn’t work for me, and in a sense, I have to criticize it. (Qtd in Roberts, 1985, p. 24)

Against this backdrop Bond offers an uncompromising and savage exposure of the strategic imperative of violence. This is used not only by the old ruling class (Lear himself) but also by his daughters Fontanelle and Bodice after they have ousted him from power. Most significantly violence is employed by Cordelia’s forces to achieve and sustain revolutionary change.

The play had its premiere, produced by the English Stage Company, at the Royal Court Theatre on 29 September 1971, directed by William Gaskill. It featured the actor Harry Andrews in the play’s title role. In a programme note for a production of Lear at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in October 1975, Bond wrote:

Shakespeare’s Lear is usually seen as an image of high, territorial academic culture. The play is seen as a sublime action and the audience is expected to show the depth of their culture by the extent to which they penetrate its mysteries [...] But the social moral of Shakespeare’s Lear is this: endure till in time the world will be made right. That’s a dangerous moral for us. We have to have a culture that isn’t an escape from the sordidness of society, the ‘natural’ sinfulness or violence of human nature, that isn’t a way of learning how to endure our problems – but a way of solving them. (Qtd in Roberts, 1985, p. 25)

In Bond’s deconstruction of Shakespeare’s classic Jacobean tragedy, Cordelia is portrayed, not as Lear’s youngest and compassionate daughter, but as ‘a rural female Castro’, as Bond described her. She is a young woman catapulted into radicalised political consciousness. Driven to action through her experience of being raped by the soldiers under the authority of the new regime established by Fontanelle and Bodice, Cordelia then leads her own revolutionary army against their regime. The daughters and their forces prove as oppressive and violent in their enforcement of state power as any means their father had previously employed.

In the opening scene of the play, Lear is inspecting the ongoing fortification and building of the wall. He discovers that a worker has accidentally killed, through exhaustion, another worker. Lear orders the accused to face a firing squad, pronouncing: ‘He killed a workman on the wall. That alone makes him a traitor.’ With this chilling logic born out of paranoiac hubris, Lear then explains the vision that, for him, ideologically and materially embodies the wall:

LEAR I started this wall when I was young. I stopped my enemies in the field, but there were always more of them. How could we ever be free? So I built this wall to keep our enemies out. My people will live behind this wall when I am dead [...] My wall will make you free. That’s why the enemies on our borders – the Duke of Cornwall and the Duke of North – try to stop us building it. I won’t ask him which he works for – they’re both hand in glove. Have him shot. (L, pp. 3–4)

Crucially different from Shakespeare’s King Lear is that Lear, from the beginning, questions the nature of political power and its execution. There is no implicit assumption that political and indeed tyrannical power is either ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’, or that it carries any implicit moral authority. In King Lear there is an intrinsic if unspoken subtext of a social and cultural code which necessitates a morally correct expression of filial devotion to the father. Cordelia’s implicit filial love has a value which, she argues, is more ‘natural’ in its resistance to the explicit, culturally coded rhetoric of her two sisters. She is punished accordingly. In Bond’s play, Lear’s two daughters’ decision to marry his enemies is viewed by Lear as both politically naive and suicidal. The daughters countermand their father’s order that the worker should be shot; they claim their future husbands’ patriarchal authority for themselves. Lear responds: ‘My enemies will not destroy my work! I gave my life to these people [...] now you’ve sold them to their enemies!’ before himself shooting the worker.

Anticipating what he views as his daughters’ treachery against him, Lear’s long following speech employs Freudian imagery to denounce their motives and actions:

I knew it would come to this! I built my wall against you as well as my other enemies! [...] You have perverted lusts. They won’t be satisfied. It is perverted to want your pleasure where it makes others suffer. I pity the men who share your beds. (L, p. 7)

This strong sense of displaced desire sublimated as the will-to-power through violence is explored further in Bond’s mapping of the complex territory of the daughters’ strategic motives. They are both intent on eliminating each other and also their respective husbands following their planned political coup against their father. Fontanelle first says in her soliloquy, ‘When he gets on top of me I have to count to ten. That’s long enough’; and Bodice in her own dramatic aside, reveals, ‘He must prove himself a man before he plays with his soldiers. He’ll fuss and try all night, but he won’t be able to raise his standard.’

These signifiers of clitoral self-empowerment present a powerful rejection of the phallocentric intrusion of the symbolic ‘father’ in both Lear and their husbands. This anticipates and prefigures the complex dialectics of gender, desire and power in the construction of the reactionary iconic persona of the ‘Iron Lady’: Margaret Thatcher, elected to power eight years on from the play’s premiere.

There is evidence also of these characters in the metaphorical function of their names. The bodice, of course, an undergarment worn traditionally by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Wearing Dead Men’s Clothes: Addressing the Past, Re-dressing the Future
• 1 Your Morality is Violence: Politicising the Past
• Interview 1 Staging Saved: Interview with Sean Holmes
• 2 Learning to Sing in the Ruins: The Later Plays, 1999–2011
• Interview 2 Tell Me a Story: Interview with Chris Cooper
• Conclusion: ‘Was Anything Done?’
• Bibliography
• Index