Endings and Beginnings: Edward Bond and the Shock of Recognition

Author(s): John Worthen

Source: Educational Theatre Journal , Dec., 1975, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 466-479
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206380

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206380?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Educational Theatre Journal

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 JOHN WORTHEN

Endings and Beginnings:

Edward Bond and the Shock of Recognition

An interviewer once asked Bond "How do you set out to make an audience
respond to this violence as you intend?" He was thinking of the stoning of the
baby in Saved, the cannibalism in Early Morning, the suffering and autopsy in
Lear--the things which made Bond a notorious rather than a well-known
playwright. Bond replied, typically:

Well, I don't think that my plays really are violent, though Early Morning might be an exception.
They have moments of violence, which are usually set in an atmosphere that is quite different--the
dismembered body of Shogo appearing at the end of Narrow Road, for instance, which isn't a violent
play. It is not even about violence--it is about the kind of situation in which violence occurs. Even in
Saved, where they talk very aggressively, it's really a joke. They never take violence seriously,
nobody in the play takes violence seriously. Violence happens there in the way that it happens to an
audience.1

At least two distinctions here matter to our sense of Bond and his theatre. The
first is the one he himself draws between the play about violence, and the play
about the situation in which violence occurs. The second is implicit in the analogy
he gives for the appearance of violence in his plays: it "happens in the way that it
happens to an audience." It is something the audience can and should recognize,
although it is onstage in a theatre; it is something that, just as properly, belongs to
the audience and its world, however much it may wish to deny it. And the way it
happens to the people in the play, apparently senselessly but actually inevitably, is
precisely the way in which the theatre audience, too, experiences it. This paper
will concentrate on the way Bond ensures that "it happens to an audience" in all
his plays up to Bingo.

He is making a vital distinction between himself and those writers who use
theatrical violence--or sex, for that matter-to outrage an audience and to give it,
as it were, a necessary kick. Such writing and staging implicitly affirms that the
staged action is aimed at an audience by one who feels superior to it. One of
Bond's more remarkable qualities is that he assumes he is like his audience, and
that his concerns are the same as its own. He told his Theatre Quarterly
interviewers that

I am a typical member of my society, and so my problems are the problems that everybody else must
solve if they're not going to die, or be killed, or be very unhappy.2

John Worthen teaches in the English Department at the University College of Swansea, Wales.
Interview in Theatre Quarterly, No. 5 (Jan.-March 1972), p. 10.
2 Ibid., p. 12.

466

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
467 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

His critical reception, however, has certainly not borne out his confidence that
he is a typical member of his society. He once remarked, rather engagingly:
I was very surprised when I wrote my first play and everybody thought it was rebellious. I thought
that was what people thought. I thought they'd all agree and say 'Yes, how sensible.'3

The extent to which they did not say that about any of Bond's early plays is now
history. And despite the welcome relaxation of hostility in the last two or three
years, Bond's public reputation as a dramatist still hardly compares with that of
Arden, or Pinter, or even Wesker or Osborne. One of the few full-length articles
on him, by a man who wrote out of sympathy and not out of hostility, found his
achievement "uneven," his first play "apprentice work," his second damaged by
"too much realism," his third "large scale but not very successful," and his
fourth "failing to advance the enquiry much further."4 With friends like that, who
needs enemies? Even the mostly favorable reception of The Sea in England
stressed, time after time, that for once the audience could rest assured that it
wouldn't be shocked and horrified. And the publicity that surrounded the London
production of Bingo continually underlined what was seen as shocking and
iconoclastic in the play. In a sense, these reactions are right; Bond has succeeded
in catching his audience on one weak spot after another, which suggests that he
has been right in writing the plays he has. But in another way, such reactions are
quite wrong, because such attention shows that his audiences have not recognized
or experienced the situations in his plays; they have seen them as simply
distasteful, as belonging not to them but to other people; and so have neutralised
the plays.

It is hard to watch the baby being stoned in Saved. But people often feel that
there must be something hardboiled in the dramatist who chooses to put it in a
play. Bond puts the stoning into Saved precisely because he finds it revolting and
intolerable; but he finds what happens to the baby no more revolting than what
happens to its mother and father, Pam and Fred, even though they remain alive.
He knows that we would normally assume that their lives, even in deprivation,
were "better" than the state of the dead baby. He questions that, and makes us
ask if our compassion and shock at the baby's death are simply going where habit
and sentimentality make it easy for them to go. Bond finds both things horrible:
the lives of Pam and Fred, and the family if anything more horrible. He challenges
an audience that would like to find horror only in the death of the baby. And the
violence in his plays is always a statement or question about us, about our relative
valuation of violence, about our own judgement of our behaviour. If we see Fred
and Pete and Colin and Barry and Mike in Saved simply as young thugs who need
putting away, then we have missed the point--though that is a natural and
conventional reaction. If we say, alternatively, that they are poor unfortunates
who need doctors, not prisons, then we have missed the point just as much. If we
have to confess that our reactions worry us, then we are getting somewhere. More
is involved than horror or distaste or judgement if we are responsible members of
our society, and know what we do as fathers and mothers and governments. Our
reaction of horror lets us off too lightly, and isolates us in a secure sense of what is

* Interview with Ronald Hayman, The Guardian, May 21, 1972, p. 12.
* Arthur Arnold, "Lines of Development in Bond's Plays," Theatre Quarterly, No. 5 (Jan.-March
1972), pp. 15-19.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
468 / ETJ, December 1975

proper. And Bond is always challenging our sense of what is proper: proper as
hope, proper as tragedy, proper as ourselves.

He can do this because he is so good at creating "the kind of situation in which

violence occurs." The situations at the start of his plays are directly responsible
for the situations at the end, even though the plays often begin quietly and
normally. When we see the provincial vicarage society of The Sea, or the group of
boys at the start of The Pope's Wedding, or Pam and Len at the start of Saved, or
the autumnal calm at the start of Bingo, then we tend to accept them as 'normal'
situations. But Bond is working out his sense of the horror and deficiency of what
can be seen every day; for instance, Scopey's lunatic situation at the end of The
Pope's Wedding, with a month-old corpse on the floor beside him, follows
implicitly from his reaction to the life we saw in that first, 'normal' scene. Not that
Bond's audience has generally managed to see that direct relationship on its first
viewing of the plays-it has complained, instead, that violence erupts spontane-
ously and gratuitously in Bond. Audiences at first tend to see one thing, to which
they have a shock reaction, and to stop there. But the theatrical experience
encourages us to get over our first reactions to both 'normal' and 'abnormal', and
to see something else instead. The family of Saved, which we thought at first was
just ordinary, turns out to be appalling; and we want to say something like "what a
way to live-how unbearable-thank God I don't have to live like that." In the
end, however, the play forces us to say something like "that is life for people in
my society: and people like Len can bear it, and live well in it." Bond is always
wanting us to see things more fully than our normal habits allow us to and, so, to
realise the terms of our lives more acutely; and so, to know better what we need.
As he said himself about Saved:

I would like people to have seen something that they might have read about in a newspaper, or even
have been involved in, but not really understood--because they see it from a partial point of view, or
whatever-suddenly to be able to see it whole, and to be able to say, well, now I can understand all
the pressures that went into the making of that tragedy. When I come to judge that situation, my
judgement will be more accurate.5

In short, the violence-or the apparent abnormality-is designed to provoke an

awareness in us, and to make us recognize what we normally prefer not to
recognize. We recognize things in the same way, and at the same rate, as the
characters on stage can.
The Pope's Wedding, staged in 1962, contains within it the germ of almost
everything Bond has done. It is an intensely intellectual play which is yet not in
the least didactic; it has the fluid sequence of scenes Bond prefers for the kind of
play he wants to write (for his plays do not develop, in the usual sense, but group
and regroup until their conclusions become inescapable); it has the innovations of
staging-here, the cricket match; it has the dialogue which looks so clumsy on the
printed page but which is utterly precise and direct; above all, the concerns of the
play are made wholly theatrical. The familiar scene with which the play starts
turns out to be, itself, something horrifying. Scopey is a farm-worker with no
sense of a life outside the routine of getting up the next day for work; we see him
with his mates who have, like him, no solutions apart from going on to the next
day. He marries Pat, an eighteen-year-old with no parents, and similarly without a
5 Ibid., p. 13.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
469 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

future; she is bored, perhaps, with sleeping around, and Scopey attracts her after
the cricket match he was responsible for winning. Heroism is not a common
quality in that village--or elsewhere, come to that. Scopey and Pat are utterly and
blessedly unsymbolic; they are more realistically married than any other couple I
know of on the stage of the early Sixties. They have sex to look forward to, and
that is practically all, apart from the vague hope of getting a house of their own.
They just go on together, as they had previously gone on separately. Normally we
accept the fact that there are thousands of married couples like Sco and Pat; we
may thank our lucky stars that we are not like them, but they are common enough.
We forget that life lived in such conditions of emptiness is intolerable. It is one of
the most common of all contemporary human experiences, and it is intolerable.
We see Pat with Bill, the man she might have married, and for them life is simple,
normal and reassuring: "Comin' in a Stor'ford Saturday? I'm puttin' the deposit
down on my new car." "That sounds nice."6 Life revolves around the job, the
home, the pub, the monthly interest payments. Scopey, however, is remarkable,
because he tries to behave as a human being in his situation; he wants a Pope's
Wedding with another kind of life, where people talk to each other, where there is
relationship and the chance to care.
Just outside the village, in a corrugated iron hut, lives an old man-Alen-for
whom Pat is in some way responsible; she promised her mother to look after him.
She does it callously, boredly, ordinarily; he is a chore to her with which she
copes almost unthinkingly. Scopey is attracted to the old man; the hut is on his
way home from work, and he offers to take over. Scopey and Alen are both unsure
and suspicious of each other, but it becomes possible for the two of them to talk,
to share talk, and to share feelings. (In one scene, to stop him stuffing himself and
making himself ill, Scopey feeds Alen by hand, which is a kind of care quite
foreign to the 'normal' behavior of the play.) The relationship breaks down almost
as soon as it has begun; Scopey is jealous of Alen, and of his attachment to
Pat-she is the devil Alen knows, and feels at home with because she makes no
demands on him. Scopey ends up wanting to be like Alen because the old man is
enviable in his kind of last-ditch invulnerability; he becomes him by dressing in his
clothes, killing him, and living in his hut. He surrounds himself with tinned food so
that he won't even need Alen's dependencies on other people. The end is
horrifying not just because of the month-old corpse on the floor (" 'Is 'ead's like a
fish"'); it is horrifying because this is how Scopey ends. Beyond the others in the
play, he was aware and alive; he is now ending up an isolated lunatic because he
wanted that Pope's Wedding with another kind of life. Pat and Bill go on,
untouched, in their terrifying normality, just as the group we saw at the start of the
play goes on. The Pope's Wedding differs from the plays Bond was to write later
because Scopey is left in his hopelessness: a Pope's Wedding "isn't going to
happen..,. can't happen."s
All the later plays, apart from Bingo, take the central figure a step further than
that, often into a kind of optimism. The Pope's Wedding prevents us from getting

6 The Pope's Wedding (London, 1971), p. 85.

71bid., p. 89.
8 Interview in Theatre Quarterly, p. 13.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
470 / ETJ, December 1975

involved with anyone beside Scopey, and tends to be a personal rather than a
group tragedy; the characters round Scopey are to illuminate him, not to live
vividly in their own way. In his later plays, up to Bingo, Bond has always wanted
us to look very hard at the characters around the central ones; as a dramatist he
has needed to realise more lives than one, because it is a society he is really talking
about, and which he wants us to recognize.

In his next play, Saved, the home life of the family is simpler, more realistic,
and far more dreadful, than the home life of The Pope's Wedding. Again, the
ending is crucial to the way we understand the beginning. We start with Len trying
to make a relationship with Pam, and being taken into the family; we end with him
accepting the family in his own way, in a scene that typifies Bond's dramatic
method. We see in its usual occupations the family he has adopted; there is no
conversation; the father, Harry, does his football pools; the mother, Mary, tidies
and sits; the daughter, Pam, reads her Radio Times and sits; her mother reads it
and sits. Len tries to mend a chair. By doing that, he asserts that he belongs to a
particular place and particular people, that he does not intend to leave them; and
that he will do what he can for them. If we contrast this with his attitudes in the
first and second scenes of the play, his malice towards Harry and the hopes for
suburban coziness he expresses to Pam, we can see how he has adapted himself to
living there. He can, indeed, bear to live there; for Bond, that is a triumph of the
human spirit. In the penultimate scene Len had found it possible to talk to Harry,
momentarily; to be honest and direct with him. There is no particular prospect of
that happening again, and (if anything) rather less chance now; but it has
happened, and it has to be enough. Bond has Len examine the chair, and try to
hammer it, and sit and think about it, and finally mend it:

His head lies sideways on the seat.

MARY sits. PAM sits.
HARRY licks the flap on the envelope and closes it quietly.
The curtain falls quickly.9

It's been ponted out that the quick fall of the curtain suggests a certain
precariousness in the situation; the tableau won't last.10 But Len is staying
though the play couldn't allow itself more certainty than that. The play is an
assertion of possibility where we, as the audience, had begun by seeing th
normal; had seen it as dreadful; and might have seen a situation of final
hopelessness.

That sense of possibility has come to be vital in Bond's plays; it is something

they return to time after time, and realise dramatically in the teeth of what we had
thought was hopeless. Len can stay with the family and not be destroyed by the
experience. At the end of The Sea, Willy is about to leave to get married; he has a
final conversation with Evens which makes him wonder if, like Evens, he too
should stay:

WILLY: Should I stay in town? Work hard. Make money. Become mayor.

* Saved (London, 1969), p. 123.

1o William Babula, "Scene Thirteen of Bond's Saved," Modern Drama, 15 (Sept. 1972), 147-149.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
471 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

EVENS: No. Go away. You won't find any more answers here. Go away and find them ...
I've told you these things so that you won't despair. But you must still change the world.11

At the moment, Willy's fianc6e Rose comes on; their packing is done, they
mustn't miss their train. "What were you saying?" she asks. Willy answers: "I
came to say goodbye, and I'm glad you-" Those are the last words of the play.
Does Willy mean "I'm glad you, too, came to say goodbye"? Or does he mean
"I'm glad you want to go," or perhaps "I'm glad you are coming with me"?
Where there are so many possible meanings, the words mean something indepen-
dent of any imagined conclusion. They mean exactly what they say: Willy is glad;
the gladness can't be separated from her. "I'm glad you-" really means "I'm
glad that life is possible, and I'm glad it's with you." It's a state of mind to start in,
as Willy and Rose are starting. Because it is cut short, it is certainly no more than
that; we can't build anything on it. But it juts out of the character, out of the play,
and into the mind of the person in the audience who, too, is going away
immediately afterwards, and it makes him wonder what he is going away into.
Could he say "I'm glad you-" and make sense? Is he going into another world,
one he must change? The sense of tentative but real possibility is exactly that of
the whole play; it is the perfect culmination of it, though our more conventional
sense of things might have expected statement and certainty. The disaster of the
first scene, and the stresses of the society we see, are met and matched by this
assertion of possibility-and only this kind of assertion, made in this kind of way,
could make any sense.

The sense of possibility is rendered strikingly at the end of Narrow Road to the
Deep North, which appeared in 1968. The play concerns an honest man, Kiro,
who kills himself when he is unable to stand any longer the things that are done in
the name of order, justice and authority. The previous ruler of the city, Shogo, as
brutal and inhuman a man as ever was, has been overthrown and executed; his
dismembered body is carried through the town nailed to a board, while Basho (the
new Prime Minister) shouts "Shogo is dead! The sin is broken! Let the new city
live for ever!"12' At this point Kiro takes out a knife and commits hari-kari. In
another play, by another writer, that would appear a sufficient and sufficiently
pointed ending. But in Narrow Road, as Kiro sits waiting for death, there is a
shout from the river at the back of the stage: a man is drowning. After a few
moments he comes on, soaking wet:

MAN: Didn't you hear me shout? (He shakes water from his hair.) I shouted help. You must have
heard and you didn't come.13

After another pause, during which he dries himself, he says "I could have
drowned"-and only then does Kiro collapse and die. The man doesn't even
notice; he has his back to Kiro and is drying himself. It is a poignant but also
disturbingly funny moment-the man is so petulant and angry. But he also
reminds us of life going on, and of our obligations: "you didn't come. I could have
" The Sea (London, 1973), p. 65.
12 Narrow Road to the Deep North (London, 1968), p. 57.
1 Ibid., p. 58.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
472 / ETJ, December 1975

drowned." By committing hari-kari, although for the best of reasons, Kiro is

cutting himself off from such obligations, and also from the possibility of
sympathy with another human being. The sense of life reasserted is the note on
which Bond wishes to end the play, not the sense which Kiro has of the morally
unjustifiable behavior of supposedly civilised men. It is a marvellous moment, and
the kind of thing only possible in theatre like Bond's, where we recognize what we
didn't know we knew.

Early Morning, Bond remarked in 1969, "is easily the most optimistic play I've
ever written,"'4 though he might now say that about The Sea. It seems at first
glance to be an intensely depressing play about our incapacity to escape the logic
of post-Victorian society; even death reveals a heaven where the characters do
explicitly what they did implicitly on earth: they eat each other. The common
reaction to the play is that Bond goes too far, and becomes crude and obvious.
Those who feel so seem not to notice that cannibalism is not only grotesque and
appalling; it is sensible, given the conditions of heaven (or hell). Again, we start
with "an atmosphere that is quite different": an apparently ordinary kind of
palace revolution, here heavily stylised and very funny. But what it implies about
politics is cannibalism, and we would prefer to be shocked and call it nonsense. At
the end, Arthur gives trouble in heaven because he has a conscience; Queen
Victoria suggests "we could eat him again. Keep his bones and chew off every
sign of life the moment it appears."15 But if that is nonsense, what is the sense of
political expertise? The play is perhaps surrealistic, but as it notes on the page
reserved for the usual saving lies about no character resembling any living person,
"The events of this play are true." Their logic and good sense are what are so
worrying about them. Arthur's decision to kill everyone off in order to stop further
violence is eminently sensible, although mad; it will certainly save suffering.
Disraeli's palace revolution has all the appearance of sanity and sense, although it
only offers the replacement of one power structure by another. Mr Gladstone is a
populist Trades Unionist who offers punishment according to the rule book and
according to acquired expertise; who can say that these things are not true? Once
again, the audience is being shown a society which it will certainly refuse to accept
as its own, and that very refusal is in a way hopeful; our remaining sanity insists
that we are not quite as mad as that, yet. We see what appears to be normality; it
quickly turns to a horrifying comedy; our sanity insists that it cannot be the last
word; and the central figure Arthur, successor to Scopey and Len, "in seeing
becomes creative, nearer freedom."'1 Society's final manifestation in the play is
as a painless cannibal orgy in heaven where, as Queen Victoria says,
There's no dirt. There's only peace and happiness, law and order, consent and co-operation. My
life's work has borne fruit. It's settled.17

But while she speaks, Arthur's corpse rises tattily over her in a parody of
resurrection; we are conscious of Florence crying for him, as Victorian heroines

14 Peace News, April 11, 1969.

15 Early Morning (London, 1968), p. 97.
1l Broadsheet (Cambridge), March 3, 1970.
17 Early Morning, p. 120.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
473 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

must cry, heedlessly after the happy death of the hero; but Arthur really has died,
unlike the unhappy ghosts of Bond's other plays, and now he is "like a fire in the
sea or the sun underground."'8 The resurrection is irrelevant, though it is an
appropriate manifestation for the old-order heaven. Arthur is free, as the mind of
the audience can be too; freer than Scopey or Len or Kiro, at least, and through
knowledge, not ignorance.

That same freedom is what Lear (and the audience) can find at the end of Lear;
only such freedom is gained in the teeth of a vicious, military-based society which
is nearer to the reality of most Western governments than anything else Bond has
shown. Saved had set out to be utterly truthful about the life of the family and the
child, and had depended on that realism for the power of its resolution (and for the
ironic optimism of its title.) Lear sets out to be truthful about the realities of
government to just the same degree, and still tries to say that the individual need
not be hopeless. Lear is avowedly tragic but, as D. H. Lawrence said, tragedy has
nothing to do with misery; it is the assertion of a life, not the capitulation of one.

King Lear is for our time the tragedy of tragedies; the tragedy of a man finally
purified by suffering. Those who insist on that also tend to insist that tragedy
cannot now be written. Bond insists that one can talk about tragedy today; as
Evens says in The Sea, "without tragedy no-one can laugh, there's only discipline
and madness."1' Bond feels that the Shakespearian Lear "could not get out of his
problems simply by suffering the consequences, or by endurance or resignation.
He had to live through the consequences and struggle with them."20 Tragedy is a
matter of not dying, of not resigning onself. And Bond's Lear does not die--he is
killed. Lear has been responsible for the direction of the state toward self-defence
and stability-at-all-costs; he has to live with the consequences of that in the lives
of the people round him. His own suffering is easier to bear than theirs. And he
has to face the fact that he can do nothing himself to change things. Changing
himself does not change his society. All he can do is live out an idea, the idea of
pity, and this is all he can appeal to at the end of the play:

If a God had made the world, might would always be right, that would be so wise, we'd be spared so
much suffering. But we made the world-out of our smallness and weakness. Our lives are so
awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is
mad.21

He would like to "live until I'm much older, and become as cunning as the fox.
Then I could teach you."22 But the idea isn't very real, and Lear eventually
confronts the reality of the world he has created and lived in; he is to "prove" it
real "by dying in it."23 He leaves the pastoral idyll into which the Ghost has
tempted him, and returns to the huge defensive wall he was building at the start of

1s Ibid., p. 110.
19 The Sea, p. 64.
20 Interview in Theatre Quarterly, p. 9.
21 Lear (London, 1972), p. 84.
22 Ibid., p. 85.
23 Ibid., p. xiv.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
474 / ETJ, December 1975

the play; he starts to dig it up, manages three spadefuls, and is then shot down by a
guard. Such assertion is not sad; it is the tragedy of the play.

It is remarkable how each of Bond's plays is a kind of commentary on the one

that preceded it. It is no coincidence that The Sea ("A Comedy") should contain
Bond's most coherent thinking about tragedy. Rose, whose fiance has been
drowned, asks Willy:

How can you escape from yourself, or what's happened to you, or the future? It's a silly question.

It's not silly; both Lear and the Ghost had made us ask it. Willy answers:

If you look at life closely it is unbearable. What people suffer, what they do to each other, how they
hate themselves, anything good is cut down and trodden on, the innocent and the victims are like
dogs digging rats from a hole, or an owl starving to death in a city. It is all unbearable, but that is
where you have to find your strength. What else is there?
ROSE: An owl starving in a city.
WILLY: To death. Yes. Wherever you turn. So you should never turn away. If you do you lose
everything. Turn back and look into the fire. Listen to the howl of the flames. The rest is
lies. 24

That should remind us of Lear talking about the trapped and hunting animals
when he is on trial (and of Bond's Shakespeare talking of the bear-baiting in
Bingo); Lear says "I can't live with that suffering in the world.'"25 In rehearsal at
the Royal Court, Bond is reported to have said that "Lear hears all the victims
cry, all the people who have ever passed through the court room."26 It is what all
Bond's plays want us to consider as the bedrock of our actual experience, beneath
the everyday normality; and it has to be confronted: "turn back and look into the
fire." The play is a mechanism for ensuring that we do that. Our experience when
we do so is like Lear's: it takes him, and us, to the end of the play to be able to
think at all like Willy.

The Sea caused some critical relief that Bond wasn't putting his audience
through the usual bloodbath. Such commentary ignored the fact that comedy is
often at least as harrowing as tragedy, that The Sea is mostly concerned with
suffering and hatred, and that people's humiliation and self-exposure is very hard
to bear, for them and for us. The play begins with a storm that inevitably reminds
us of The Tempest-the third stage-direction actually runs "The tempest grows
louder"27-but the land turns out to be inescapably the modern world; instead of
the inhabitants of a magic and marvellous island, the deranged draper Hatch
comes on and tries to drive the shipwrecked survivor back into the sea; while the
drunkenness of this Trinculo, Evens, prevents him doing anything at all. A man
really does drown. Hatch is obsessed about an invasion by Martians; he is, as
Evens says of people in general, "cruel and boring and obsessed."28 He sees

24 The Sea, p. 44.

25 Lear, p. 35.
26 Production Casebook on Lear, Theatre Quarterly, No. 5, (Jan.-March 1972), p. 29.
27 The Sea, p. 1.
28 Ibid., p. 14.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
475 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

Martians where he could have seen human beings, and ruthlessness and hatred
and bullying, much nearer home. But we know how well his feelings relate to his
position as a draper in a community where Mrs Rafi dominates, hating her
fellow-beings, and putting as many of them as she can through the performing
hoops of her church pageant. Hatch's feelings that things are, somehow, amiss,
run directly counter to the official view, as do his passions. When he interrupts the
self-indulgent ceremony of scattering the ashes of the drowned man, his social
superiors see him as the type of unfeeling vulgarity, but his words ring true:

I don't know if you're all ghosts or if you still have time to save yourselves. (He cries to himself.) I'm
out of touch. I tried to save you from your foolishness and selfishness.29

The play makes us see his madness and obsession as a natural reaction to his
situation, just as Bingo sees the puritan obsession as another natural reaction. In
fact, the atmosphere of the play directly belies its apparently cheerful and farcical
content; the social pressures of provincial 1907 (where a part of us all still lives)
are marvellously well captured, and the sense of a society on the brink of change,
yet rooted in its old ways, is very strong. When Evens says at the end, "You must
still change the world,"30 it is our world he means; we have to consider whether it
is changed, in essentials, from the world of 1907 we have seen in the play. The
play, that is, remains as radical in its questioning as Early Morning, and it relies
again on Bond confronting his audience with something familiar-period East
Coast, vicarage society, a performance in aid of the coastguard fund-that
changes as we look at it to reveal the obsessions and madness of our own society;
which, again, are both unbearable, and borne by the play without being turned
away from.

In Bond's most recent play, Bingo, Shakespeare is in retirement in Stratford,

and eventually kills himself; like Kiro's suicide in Narrow Road, the act confesses
complicity and responsibility-and honesty. The divisions in his life have become
vivid to him, by the end, and he cannot live with that knowledge. He lives in a
society of self-righteous security, on the one hand, and insecure poverty on the
other; the financial and domestic security, although that of the seventeenth
century, is recognizably our own, and that which we expect law and order to
maintain for us. The men whom Shakespeare tacitly, though not deliberately,
opposes are the poor of the town, whose common land is in danger of enclosure;
the security he is guaranteed allows him to remain sitting in his garden. The poor
have, in their turn, to find a way of life that allows them relief from their kind of
insecurity, and some find it in fatalistic puritanism, in which one accepts
everything-indeed, welcomes it-because it is the work of God. That is horrible,
and true; Bond's version of religion in the play is particularly acute. Stratford in
the seventeenth century was suffering from a kind of inflamed puritanism, and
Bond links it with the unchangeable status quo of the poor at a time of capitalistic
advance (seen in the pressure for enclosure). In such ways he establishes the
status quo of modern society; the belief that men need "sticks and carrots," the

29 Ibid., p. 54.
30o Ibid., p. 65.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
476 / ETJ, December 1975

belief that they are greedy and incompetent and need government that is stronger
than them. These things are accepted by the landowners and, crucially, by the
poor themselves. As the Son says, about the landowner Combe, "We see the
same truth from odd sides but us both know tis the truth."31

Both in Lear and Bingo Bond starts from the premise that Shakespeare's plays
are truly ours, and not primarily historical; and that his concerns cannot really be
judged by us, but only lived out in our way. To make Shakespeare a character is,
however, particularly daring, because we all have an uncomfortable sense of bad
plays about Shakespeare, by worse playwrights; and we have the biographies, the
documents, the signatures, the Stratford bust, which all tell us so little--as if there
were a conspiracy to keep Shakespeare anonymous. (The Droeshout engraving
ought to be so revealing, but presents us with nothing except a vast forehead and a
heavy growth of beard.) So when the curtain goes up with the stage-direction
"Emptiness and silence. SHAKESPEARE comes in. He carries a sheet of
paper,"32 then we are all potentially embarrassed. Only the comics can get away
with this kind of thing. The piece of paper is particularly worrying; will he start
writing The Tempest? The worry is important; the paper Shakespeare carries turns
out not to be part of a play, but a financial agreement. This Shakespeare has
stopped writing. Indeed, he does very little indeed for the first two-thirds of the
play except sit. We are not being invited to look into the soul of genius, but to
contemplate his garden, his family, his relationships, and the part he plays in his
community. Only when we know these things does Shakespeare say very much;
and even then, it isn't very much, except in the short Scene Five. Bond is,
however, destroying our comfortable natural haziness about Shakespeare; he isn't
a man with a serene final period, or the soul of genius, but a man with financial
commitments and problems. The problems have nothing to do with being a genius,
apart from his ability to perceive them;33 they have a good deal to do with being
alive and secure in our kind of society.

If we look at the play in the context of Bond's other work we can see this more
clearly. The Pope's Wedding and Saved were explicitly about contemporary
England in the early and middle Sixties. Narrow Road began to do odd things with
time; it is set in "Japan about the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth
centuries," which on the face of it is ridiculous; but Bond is not writing a historical
play at all. Although he is using the actual seventeenth-century poet Basho, he
also wants European colonisation of the eighteenth century, gunboat diplomacy of
the nineteenth, and Victorian manifestations of the type of Georgina. Above all,
he wants present in the audience's mind the relation these things have to the
present day; he wants our history and ourselves, as well as a timeless study of the
city. Early Morning uses time distortions in an even more extreme way; Queen
Victoria puts on trial a man accused of cannibalism in a cinema queue. The play is
a study of the immediate cause and context of our own society's behavior. Lear

31 Bingo (London, 1974), p. 37.

32 Ibid., p. 1.
3 Bond has admitted that he gave his Shakespeare unusual self-knowledge: "I do think he was
ahead of his time" (letter to the Sunday Times, Nov. 25, 1973, p. 33).

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
477 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

goes both further back, at least to Shakespeare's time, and comes further forward;
the political and military context is that of our own moment, the cultural context
that of the last four hundred years. The Sea is historical in a precise way: "East
Coast, 1907," a society immediately previous to ours that is both our own, and not
our own. Set in that context, and in that of a debate continuing from Lear, Bingo is
not so odd. The seventeenth century is by common consent the first age to be
really our own: the age of the language of the King James Bible, of England's
political revolution, and of Shakespeare. We are the descendants of it as we are
not of the England of 1415 or 1515. Bingo wants us to be conscious not of 1615, but
of the period 1615-1975.

If there is to be a criticism to be made of Bingo, it should not be of Bond's use of

history or of his use of the Welcombe enclosure affair; he has been scrupulous
and, given the need for compression, exact. The most common recent criticism of
him has been that his apocalyptic messages outstrip his dramatic performances,
but I am not particularly conscious of that, either. It is not the intellectual
substance of Bingo that is worrying, but the staging of people whose lives are
symbolic beyond the realities of their world. Bingo offers us something very
unusual in Bond: a very narrow range of human experience. Combe is a simpler
and less interesting figure than Basho, or Shogo, or Cordelia and the Carpenter in
Lear-characters whose toughness and practical politics were offered as rep-
resentative of the kind of society to which we are accustomed. Combe is almost
wholly functional. He isn't cardboard, because his language is vivid and convinc-
ing, but his function seems more important than his dramatic presence. The same
is true of the Young Woman; it is significant that four of the play's central
characters are called Old Man, Old Woman, Son, and Young Woman. Their roles
and functions are most of the time more important than their individuality; and
though it is doubtless part of Bond's point that only the gentry in this society have
much individuality, that is a dramatist's point, not a dramatic reality. Even the
briefly named and occasional characters of The Pope's Wedding, like Bill, Ron,
Len, Lorry and Joe, are more themselves than these central characters. It is as if
Bond found himself having to write a modern morality play. His subtitle suggests
that he himself was conscious of that: "Scenes of Money and Death." It sounds a
little like the Pardoner's Tale, told by someone other than the Pardoner.
Shakespeare himself is the character most affected by this; we are, anyway, less
prepared to grant him individuality since history has refused to give it to him; and
he isn't, here, the creator of Falstaff or Hamlet, but the man who wrote the scenes
on the heath in King Lear-almost exclusively those-because Bond is worried by
the contradiction between that and his role as a secure member of the gentry.
Exactly as in a morality play, there is a structure, a limiting structure, which our
minds have to find congenial before the play can make more than incidental sense.
Bond's Shakespeare opts for security and financial advantage; when he realises
the implications of that, the contradiction is so overpowering that he has to kill
himself. The fable is a difficult one because it is so much a moral fable; in the
language I have been using to talk about Bond's theatre, we are not in Bingo
encouraged to confront, be shocked, recognize, and understand these things but,
instead, to see what we ought to believe. The images used by the play (such as the

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
478 / ETJ, December 1975

gibetted young woman) are, accordingly, functional; they support a point of view.
Our job as an audience is not to learn how to recognize ourselves, but simply to
learn from what we are shown; the characters are functional because it is our job
to understand their function. I don't believe that they move inside us, as a
worrying part of our own humanity, with the insistence of, say, the characters of
The Sea. Bond himself clearly finds the experiences of the play immensely real
and immediate, but I suggest that they belong more to his own energetic
exploration of the past, and of Shakespeare, than they do to us. The play presents
his findings rather than his exploration. And in a way it is the least independent of
his plays; it depends on our knowing the continuing debate between Bond and his
plays, and on our thinking along the lines of the author. It develops its own
dramatic metaphors, which would arouse and compel our acceptance, least of all
his plays. Only the character of Shakespeare himself sometimes transcends these
limitations; and even then we watch his suicide, as we watch that of Kiro, without
the added context of that assertion of inescapable life. It is in fact an end
remarkably like that of Scopey; that of the man isolated by seeing further than
other men, and a victim of his own understandings and self-hatred. Put simply, it
constitutes a shock without finally leading us into a recognition of ourselves.

In saying all this, I may seem to be ignoring what Bond has insisted on
whenever he has talked about his plays; that when he is writing them he isn't
thinking about his audience. In 1969, for instance, he said:

My problems centre on the play; the audience is secondary when I'm writing. And it's odd; things
seem so plain to me, two and two make four, and then people seem to find some great difficulty in my
plays.34

And he told his Theatre Quarterly interviewers, when they asked him to what
extent he was aware of the audience when writing a play, "Oddly enough, not at
all." But it is important to complete that answer:

If you're in a bicycle race you have to assume that you can ride a bike-if you're always thinking
about how you're doing it you won't win. So one must be aware of how certain things work with an
audience, but not let this awareness get too much in the way. I couldn't work by asking, "what's the
audience going to think about this, or, what must I tell the audience this week?"3

The relationship with the audience for him is as implicit as the cycle is to the
cyclist. He also went on to state, "I am a typical member of my society and so my
problems are the problems that everybody else has."36 But if he were simply
working out problems, he could write novels, or not write at all. As he also said,
"a performance is social.""'37 It reminds us of what we have in common with each
other, and reinforces what we tend to forget, just as the play is the dramatist's
reminder of what he has in common with people.

That doesn't mean that an audience will have the same way of talking about
things as Bond--or the same desire to. When he shows us Queen Victoria as a
34 Broadsheet (Cambridge), Feb. 3, 1970.
35 Interview in Theatre Quarterly, p. 12.
36 Interview in The Guardian, p. 12.
3 Arnold, p. 17.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
479 / BOND'S ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

cannibal, I doubt if he expects us to say "Ah-just what we always thought."

Although he expects people to recognize what he sees, that doesn't mean that the
language of the plays, or their dramatic modes, belong to the audience already.
They haven't written the plays; they have simply caught the number 19 bus to the
Royal Court. An interview Bond gave in 1973, just before The Sea was staged,
takes us to the heart of the matter:

When I wrote Lear, I wanted to say "All right, I'm going to make demands on my audience." They
had to go away and say "Aha!" In The Sea I had a different intention. I wanted deliberately to say to
the audience "You mustn't despair. You mustn't be afraid. You must be conscious of the dangers
but nevertheless be conscious of your strengths. Be conscious of your intelligence."38

In the dynamic relationship between the play and its audience, Bond is wanting
our experience of change and understanding to open our own eyes; and he may
shock us. But the shock is, finally, the momentary thing, and what we are being
shocked into is the important thing-a recognition of ourselves and our society.
Our experience of Bond's theatre is often that of the shock of recognition rather
than that of the shock of horror. He insists, convincingly, that he is like us, and
that we are society, like him; he wants us to experience the recognition of what
that implies; and I suggest that, in all his plays up to Bingo, what we share with
him makes the experience possible.

38 Interview in The Guardian, p. 12.

This content downloaded from

99.81.149.184 on Fri, 14 Jan 2022 08:01:22 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms