British playwright Edward Bond’s radical ideas and theories inspired dramatists in India too

Edward Bond, a controversial playwright and theorist, challenged audiences with themes of violence and social justice in his impactful works.

Edward Bond first attracted attention with The Pope’s Wedding and Saved in the 1960s. A playwright, theatre director, poet and dramatic theorist, Bond, obsessed with the question of responsibility, confronted his audiences with violence and cruelty around themes such as imperialism, economic exploitation, war and apartheid. This was reflected in plays such as Saved and Narrow Road to the Deep North. With Bond’s passing on March 3, at the age of 89, theatre has lost a highly controversial writer, whose radicalism about modern theatre and society, as well as his dramatic theories, won him an esteemed place among 20th and 21st century dramatists and theorists.

After Look Back in Anger written by John Osborne in 1956, it was Bond’s Saved, written in 1965, that took England by storm, making it a searing critique of a government unable to live up to the promises it had made after World War II, of offering a beleaguered nation a stable economy and future. Saved was set in the poverty stricken districts of post-war South London, where the youth lived off dole and lacked direction and purpose in their lives. The play centred around Len, a young working-class man struggling to find hope as the girl he loves, Pam, gives birth to another man’s unwanted child. Pam’s baby is born into a loveless and hopeless world, coming to a brutal end when it is stoned to death by local ruffians in a public park — as a dazed Len looks on, unable to stop them.

Produced in 1965 by the Royal Court Theatre, the play shocked and outraged audiences by the mindless manner in which youngsters had partaken of such a brutal and violent act. This scene became reason enough for Britain’s censorship board to ban the production. In his own defence, Bond stated, “I write for human salvation... drama is about justice, about social justice”.

Theatre stalwarts like Laurence Olivier intervened, condemning the censorship. In a letter to the press, Olivier stated, “Saved is not a play for children but for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it.” Though the Royal Court Theatre lost the case, in the long-run, Saved created waves that led to the abolition of stage censorship in Britain altogether in 1968.

One often asks whether art has any real power or agency to bring about a change in society. In the instance of Saved, we find that Bond’s efficacy lay in his unrelenting resistance to any cuts in either the production or the printed version. He remained committed to his beliefs, winning the day with theatre companies across the world choosing to stage Saved, including a brilliant production by the young German director Peter Stein, at the Schaubühne in Berlin. Its theme undoubtedly spoke to the hopelessness and helplessness that prevailed across Europe during the 60s and 70s.

Closer home, as a young director, I chanced upon a script of Saved and felt compelled to stage it. It was August 1975. There was a sense of unease across the country as Emergency had been declared a few months earlier in June. A lurking sense of fear of being exposed to unknown forces made one anxious. This was one of my reasons for staging this play at the time. The young actors of Ruchika Theatre Group who had asked me to direct a play for them, seemed to have the requisite spirit, and an immediate understanding of the uncontrolled hysteria that overtakes the play. Alok Nath, Mona Chawla, Arun Kukreja and Kusum Haidar brought the play alive, while the acutely angled levels that rose up from the stage floor, the battered sofa, the strange ‘nets’ that were suspended from the flies, were elements of Nissar Allana’s surreal set that provided the spectator with images of a tentative and unstable world, one that reflected the precariousness of the times.

Another Bond script that was staged in Delhi was Narrow Road to the Deep North, directed by Ebrahim Alkazi at the National School of Drama (NSD) in 1973. A satirical play on the British Empire, it was a political parable set in Japan in the Edo period, dealing with the poet Basho and the changing political landscape over 35 years. Told with Brechtian simplicity, here we saw the conflict between two worlds: an extravagant world where Britannia ruled and the cool samurai deliberation of a traditional Japan. Raising moral issues, Alkazi’s production highlighted satirical references to historic events at a time when we in India had begun to reinvestigate our experience of colonialism.