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Edward Bond has been, since his controversial arrival on the theatrical scene in 1965, one of Britain's most distinctive and important theatre writers. This study examines his work, from The Pope's Wedding (1962) to Coffee (1995). It gives an overview of the development of his distinctive dramatic language and style, and looks at his experiments with various theatrical forms and genres. It examines, too, the ways in which Bond's insistence upon the necessity of the drama as an agent of social evolution have determined his development as a dramatist. There are sections which situate Bond's work within its wider theatrical and political contexts, and which explore his concerns with issues such as violence, technology and social evolution, as they are expressed in plays such as Saved (1965), and Lear (1971). The study also deals with Bond's continual dialogue with our cultural history - with the ways in which he rewrites classic plays and plunders familiar theatrical genres in order to demythologize the past.
Five new plays by one of Britain's top playwrights.
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Plays Six includes some of the most acclaimed work of Edward Bond, one of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, who is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. The collection includes The War Plays and Choruses from After the Assasinations. In The War Plays (Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People, Great Peace): "Bond particularises daunting themes and subjects, but examines them within the context of every day life. His platform is a trilogy of plays that deal with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The first, - a quick, telling chronicle of a life destroyed before it ever got lived - puts forth Bond's notions of contempo...
"Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to emerge from the sixties ... the most savagely powerful dramatist writing today ... Bond's plays cannot be ignored" (Independent) Saved - "The most uncompromising, original and un-English English play of the sixties" (Observer); Early Morning - "A gargantuan Swiftian metaphor of universal consumption" (Observer); The Pope's Wedding - "This bizarre and unclassifiable piece is an astonishing tour de force for a first play, and if it comes to that, would be an astonishing tour de force if it were a fifty-first... Bond is an original" (Bernard Levin, Daily Mail)
The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixti This collected volume contains three plays which continue Edward Bond's exploration of themes from Shakespeare and other classical authors. Bingo puts Shakespeare himself on stage in a critical account of the writer and Stratford landowner's final days. The Fool is based on the life and madness of the 19th-century working-class poet John Clare and The Woman is set at the end of the Trojan War with Hecuba as a main character, but instead of offering a resolution its Tempest-like second half defines the nature of social conflict. All three plays deal with the origins of the tensions of the modern world. Also included is Stone, a one-act parable of oppression. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)
In this book, Jenny Spencer presents an in-depth examination of Bond's work.
The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixties" Lear - "Bond's greatest (and biggest) play ... It is even more topical now and will become more so as man's inhumanity gains subtle sophistication with the twenty-first century's approach" (The Times); The Sea - "It blends wild farce with tragedy and ends with a sliver of hope ... what makes the play fascinating is Bond's bleak poetry and social comedy" (Guardian); Narrow Road to the Deep North - "His best piece so far ... No one else could have written it" (The Times); Black Mass, written for performance at an anti-apartheid demonstration: "A Georg Grosz picture come to life ... the only possible kind of artistic imagery through which to speak of such evil" (Listener); Passion - a play for CND: "Mingles comedy and high anger with absolute sureness." (Guardian) Edward Bond is "one of our outstanding playwrights ... He is already an acknowledged classic" (Plays and Players)
In this first volume of notebooks, Edward Bond reveals himself to be one of the finest and most creative minds to have emerged in the twentieth century. Exploring the meeting point between politics and the art of the writer, Bond's notes chart the creative progress of his work and thinking over a twenty-year period, from 1959, when his first plays started to be produced at London's Royal Court Theatre, to 1979, when he had achieved fame as a major writer. While providing a detailed commentary on his plays the Notebooks also contain early play drafts, poems and stories, his thoughts on life, Brecht, art and dramatic method as well as his notes on censorship.
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.