Goodbye to the playwright Edward Bond, the author who told the world without sweeteners | Culture

The French media have farewelled the Englishman Edward Bond, who died on March 3 at the age of 89 in Cambridge, with the honors due to a French-speaking playwright. The author of saved (Saved), Early Morning and Bingo, works that shook the London scene between the late 60s and early 70s, had a collection of irresolvable disagreements with the state theaters of the British capital from the following decade onwards. In 1985 he left the administration of The War Plays (Pieces of War), a Royal Shakespeare Company manufacturing, and accused the firm of “flirting with the tourism sector.” Later he left the stalls throughout two revivals of The Sea (one in every of them directed by Sam Mendes at the National Theatre), as a result of he discovered them each boring. “English theater has grow to be infantile, it solely appeals to feelings (…) We are handled as if we have been kids,” she complained in an interview.

The son of farmers who had to to migrate to London throughout the Great Depression, Bond turned taken with theater as a result of his college took him to see a Macbeth, simply after the Second World War. He labored as a paint mixer, was an assembler in a automobile manufacturing unit and served in the army in occupied Vienna. At the age of 21, he entered the younger writers’ circle at the Royal Court in London, the place he premiered The Pope’s weddings (1962). In 1965, Bond was making ready to launch saved on this identical theater, however Lord Charberlain, censor of the Royal Household, refused to give his approval if a scene was not modified. The author flatly refused and his unprecedented gesture unleashed a marketing campaign of protests that managed to get rid of, three years later, the requirement of prior censorship, in power for greater than two centuries. During the interval during which it was prohibited, saved It was the best worldwide success of British theater at the time: it included thirty productions overseas.

In the scene that was inadmissible for the censor, a gaggle of younger folks from the outskirts of London stoned the child of one in every of them. A earlier scene the place the little boy cried his eyes out whereas his household ignored him appeared harsher to critics. With the protagonist triangle shaped by Led, Pam and the kid’s father, Bond highlighted the penury, the absence of horizons and the brutalization to which working-class younger folks, like the author himself, have been doomed. “Writing about violence comes as naturally to me as writing about manners comes to Jane Austen,” he as soon as mentioned.

From savedBond then strung collectively a quintet of works that set up him as an excellent author of the common theater of the second half of the twentieth century: Early Morninggrotesque satire of the Victorian court docket; The slim street to the deep northwritten in the model of theater No; Leara radical replace of the Elizabethan piece of the identical identify; The Seaand Bingo (1973), a portrait of an aged Shakespeare who has grow to be a landowner complicit in the criminalization of poverty, understanding that the new legislation will lead beggars to the gallows.

In many Bond works a child seems deserted to its destiny. The narrator of the first of his conflict items (a seven-hour triptych efficiently staged by Alain Françon at the 1994 Avignon Festival) is an unborn individual burned in the womb throughout a nuclear explosion. “I’m a citizen of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Bond states in one in every of his poems. In his theater there may be at all times a lacerating antagonism between some unscrupulous topics and others who stumble in the direction of the mild. The adventures of his characters are excessive, like that of the Greek tragic heroes, as a result of, he says, “solely by addressing the excessive can actuality be understood.” He is, nonetheless, an optimistic author: he trusts that incisive theater can change actuality. He would not suppose the London scene is alongside these strains: “The National Theater is a Technicolor sewer,” he even mentioned.

Bond’s work has influenced authors similar to Sarah Kane, whom he supported, Mark Ravenhill and the Irishman Martin McDonagh. In Spain it has been staged little and fewer edited. Exceptions are the meeting of saved (Salvats) starring Julio Manrique and Ariadna Gil, directed by Josep Maria Mestres in 1998 at the Lliure; the premiere of Summer (Estiu) at the TNC, with Julieta Serrano and Mercedes Sampietro directed by Manel Dueso, in 2001; or that of Have I None (I haven’t got one other one), with staging by Carlos Aladro, in 2013 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.

Since 1985, the author of Coffee (drama about the bloodbath of tens of hundreds of Jews, but additionally Soviet prisoners of conflict, gypsies, partisans and communist militants, in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar, throughout World War II) writes works commissioned by the firm Big Brum , from Birmingham, which represents them in faculties for college students between 9 and 12 years outdated. Several of them are set in an apocalyptic 12 months 2077. In Granada, his buddy César Villa, Founder of the Patio Edward Bond Youth Association, tries to do related work.

Bond additionally composed opera scripts and movie scripts, together with Blow-Upnominated for the 1966 Oscar. In his opinion, it was up to Greek theater to speak about justice, as a result of the legislation was unjust. dea (2016), the final work he directed in England, is a radical rereading of Medea. It will premiere in France in October at the Théâtre-Studio de Alfortville, on the outskirts of Paris, on the initiative of Christian Benedeti, one other nice supporter of the British author.