British playwright Edward Bond dies at 89
By Justin | Published | No Comments
Edward Bond, the theater provocateur who ruined his career by refusing to compromise his searing poetic vision, died on Sunday at the age of 89. The death of the playwright known for “Deliverance,” “King Lear” and “Bingo” was confirmed by the institution Casarotto Ramsay. Associates.
“I wrote the story of the rape of a corpse with a beer bottle to bring back some dignity to our theaters,” Bond wrote in the program notes for his 2016 play “Dea,” which retells Medea, in The mythology is layered with incest and necrophilia. A common crime of infanticide. As was typical of his later career, the play’s world premiere was not at a large institution but at the troubled Seccombe Theater in Sutton, a suburb of south London, which closed a few weeks later.
Born in north London in 1934, the son of an agricultural worker turned garage mechanic, Bond claimed to have taught himself to read from his mother’s shopping catalogs. He attributes his fascination with theater to witnessing his sister being sawed in half while working as a magician’s assistant at a local music hall, and to watching Macbeth during a class outing shortly before he dropped out of school at the age of 15. Donald Wolfit.
He became a voracious autodidact, incorporating his early experiences of wartime bombing and social exclusion into plays, and burst onto the London stage in the early 1960s. His breakthrough came when he was invited to join a newly formed writers’ group after submitting two plays to the royal court. His first full-length play, The Pope’s Wedding, premiered there in 1962. The show forewarned his talent for controversy, with one critic dismissing it as “too obscure” and another praising it as a “stunning masterpiece”.
Three years later, he secured a place in 20th-century theater history with Deliverance, a play whose depiction of alienated urban youth culminated in the infamous scene of being stoned to death in a pram. Despite strenuous defense from leading figures including Laurence Olivier, the Crown was prosecuted and fined a token 50 guineas for flagrant defiance of Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to censor the play.
Undaunted, the theater went on to premiere another Bond thriller, The Surreal Morning, in 1967, in which Queen Victoria killed Prince Albert and raped Florence Nightingale. , and became the mother of conjoined twins. The resulting impasse – both of the first two plays were banned from future productions in the UK – played a key role in the abolition of theater censorship in 1968.
During prohibition, however, Saved became The most successful export in British theater history, more than 30 different productions were staged around the world from 1966 to 1969. It made Bond a giant on the world stage, and his reputation abroad would be far greater than at home, especially in France, where many of his later works premiered.
After the release of the Edwardian-set comedy The Sea in 1973, Bond’s relationship with his Royal Court winner Bill Gaskill ended, with Gaskill later accusing the playwright of “following in the footsteps of Brecht and putting Dialectical theory imposes itself on his imagination”.
His on-again, off-again relationship with the Court eventually broke down after a row over The Restoration (1981), which led to years of public bickering with director Max Stafford-Clark over who was to blame. ——It is said that the director’s notes have no dramatic significance. , or writers who are allegedly impossible to work with.
By then he had moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where his plays included Bingo, about Shakespeare as an aging landowner who sells out the local farmers to protect his own interests. But by 1985, his relationship with movies had become so strained that he dropped out of his post-nuclear trilogy War Drama in the middle of rehearsals. When a school in Milton Keynes later replayed one of the trilogy, he quipped that their production was “well beyond the capabilities of the Royal Shakespeare Company”.
Youth theater subsequently became a platform for him to create new work in the UK, with the Birmingham-based educational theater company Big Brum premiering seven of his plays between 1995 and 2009. But international interest continued to flow into his home in Cambridgeshire, where he worked for 50 years with his German wife Elisabeth Bond-Pablé, with whom he collaborated on translations of Frank Wedekind’s plays .
He left behind more than 50 plays that continue to be popular around the world, confronting theater audiences with what he diagnosed as a “human crisis.”
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