Edward Bond

Edward Bond (born July 18 1934) is a English playwright, theatre director, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of the play Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. His highly controversial work has met with extremes of reaction, from vilification to claims that he is the world's greatest living dramatist.

Prophet without honour

Up until this point, Bond's plays were produced by the major institutions of the British theatre: the National, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court. These relationships came to a dramatic end in the mid-1980s, with the National's refusal to let him direct the premier of Human Cannon (1984), a Spanish Civil War epic; his dissatisfaction over the Royal Court's revivals of Saved and The Pope's Wedding in 1984; and the disastrous premier of the trilogy The War Plays, dealing with nuclear apocalypse, by the RSC in 1985. This meant for example that a major work, Jackets (1989), is still virtually unknown in the UK.

Related Topics:
Royal Shakespeare Company - The War Plays

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From the mid-seventies, Bond's audience in mainland Europe has grown and it was to here that he turned. He has a fecund relationship with the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris; they produced a major version of The War Plays in 1995 as well as productions (some premieres) of In the Company of Men (1992), an intense exploration of the big business world; Coffee (1996), set partly in the Imagination and partly at the Nazi execution site Babi Yar; and The Crime of the 21st Century (2000), a bleak parable set in a The Matrix-like future.

Related Topics:
Théâtre National de la Colline - Paris - Coffee - Imagination - Nazi - Babi Yar - The Crime of the 21st Century - The Matrix

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Bond's most recent contributions to British theatre have been for the Birmingham-based theatre-in-education company Big Brum. These have included At the Inland Sea (1995), in which a youth confronts the legacy of the holocaust; Eleven Vests (1997), on scholastic and military authoritarianism; and Have I None (2000), another futuristic parable. Also in 2000, The Children was performed at a Community college in Cambridge.

Related Topics:
Birmingham - Theatre-in-education - At the Inland Sea - Authoritarianism - Cambridge

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In the past two decades, he has written the television plays Olly's Prison (BBC, 1993), which has also been produced on stage by Berliner Ensemble, and Tuesday (BBC Schools, 1993); as well as the radio plays Chair (BBC Radio 4, 2000) and Existence (2002).

Related Topics:
Olly's Prison - BBC - Berliner Ensemble

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