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Plays #9
Plays 9: Innocence / Window, Tune, Balancing Act / The Edge
Edward Bond Plays:9 brings together recent work by the writer of the classic stage plays Saved, Lear, The Pope's Wedding, and Early Morning. The volume comprises five new plays and a comprehensive introduction by the author exploring theories of writing and theatre.
Innocence is the final play in The Paris Pentad, a dramatic epic stretching from the 1940s to the end of the twenty-first century. The conflicts at the heart of civilisation have erupted into violence, and the characters in Innocence must seek refuge in each other to escape the cruelty of war.
Window, Tune, Balancing Act and The Edge are plays commissioned by The Big Brum Theatre. With themes of drug use, violence, suicide, and mother-son relations, the plays focus on problems directly aimed at modern youth culture. Ideally suited to students, performers and particularly university showcases, they are short, interesting and powerful pieces.
This edition also includes some of Bond's previously unpublished Theatre Poems.
Innocence is the final play in The Paris Pentad, a dramatic epic stretching from the 1940s to the end of the twenty-first century. The conflicts at the heart of civilisation have erupted into violence, and the characters in Innocence must seek refuge in each other to escape the cruelty of war.
Window, Tune, Balancing Act and The Edge are plays commissioned by The Big Brum Theatre. With themes of drug use, violence, suicide, and mother-son relations, the plays focus on problems directly aimed at modern youth culture. Ideally suited to students, performers and particularly university showcases, they are short, interesting and powerful pieces.
This edition also includes some of Bond's previously unpublished Theatre Poems.
- GenresPlays
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 28, 2018
Edward Bond's Innocence is the final play in the Paris Pentad. Like Narrow Road and The Bundle, it begins with a woman abandoning her child. Years later, he kills his brother and almost kills her in a war zone. Still later, they are reunited and struggle to reconcile their past. There are some powerful scenes, and done well much of it could be effective. You get the impression of Bond returning compulsively to the same images - chairs, cups, babies, soldiers. It's all very abstract - it's set (like other plays in the Pentad) in an unspecified future where militaristic squads, WAPOs, roam a war-torn landscape which could be anywhere. This is kind of a problem, because although the characters deal with primal, high stakes situations, they not only lack personal histories but also lack History itself. They have very little culture, which simply is not true of people. Near the end, one of the characters has a Bondian dig at religion but we have not seen how the character in the play we've seen has come to the conclusion Bond puts in his mouth.
The Balancing Act is a surreal farce, which has never been Bond’s forte. Socially excluded young people shrink and die as monstrously caricatured authority figures pontificate and lecture. There’s a stream of Joe Ortoneque humour, which seems forced and awkward from Bond. The central metaphor, which is right up front, is of a spot which various characters become obsessed with, which is supposed to be the final stable point to the world. This gives Bond the opportunity for some frankly quite petulant rants about the troubles in world today, which read as rather stock.
Tune is ostensibly a play about a mother, her son, and her conniving lover. At first it looks as if the lover is going to be a pantomime villain (and, to an extent, he is). But the boy is more complex, and not entirely blameless in the difficulties he is having at home. There’s curious elements wherein the action becomes surreal or reflects inner realities, as when the boy morphs from the wall, or the odd talk about him feeling a colour at the end (when he seems to be homeless). You do get the impression here that Bond is pursuing some bigger statement than the rather banal story ostensibly portrays, but it also feels half formed. Then again, as a work designed to get young audiences thinking and talking about what they’ve seen, it is undoubtedly successful.
A Window opens with a couple near the end of their relationship; he’s a parasite, she wants to sleep on her own for some peace. It turns out she is pregnant, and in second scene the boy has grown into a mugger who robs to feed his mother’s drug habit. She hangs herself, and in the third scene the father returns for a confrontation with his son. There’s a running theme of blindness (a window is, after all, something you see through) - all of the characters seem blind to anything which might help their wretched situations. There are no answers, just a series of scenes in which people wrestle with their anxieties. Probably the best play in the book.
The Edge has a young man encountering an old derelict on the street, and then being followed home by the bitter old man who accuses him (falsely) of stealing his wallet. At home, the lad and his Mum are in the middle of an ongoing dispute about the travel he is about to depart on. The old man’s bitterness towards the young and the reconciliation of the relationship between mother and son become intertwined.
Some of the plays - Innocence, A Window, The Edge - contain the kind of tense, intense dramatic situations, full of menace and imminent violence, which is Bond’s forte. A number of the plays are compromised by Bond’s politics - he resorts to writing pantomime villains - but at their best, they contain both moments of intense drama and open questions about life. There’s a tendency to portray people who cannot, or will not, take a measured, informed view of their situation. Bond might say that in a mad society, who can? But often his temperature-taking feels somewhat forced. The shorter plays in the book are a good selection of the work he has done for the Birmingham-based young people’s theatre company, Big Brum.
The Balancing Act is a surreal farce, which has never been Bond’s forte. Socially excluded young people shrink and die as monstrously caricatured authority figures pontificate and lecture. There’s a stream of Joe Ortoneque humour, which seems forced and awkward from Bond. The central metaphor, which is right up front, is of a spot which various characters become obsessed with, which is supposed to be the final stable point to the world. This gives Bond the opportunity for some frankly quite petulant rants about the troubles in world today, which read as rather stock.
Tune is ostensibly a play about a mother, her son, and her conniving lover. At first it looks as if the lover is going to be a pantomime villain (and, to an extent, he is). But the boy is more complex, and not entirely blameless in the difficulties he is having at home. There’s curious elements wherein the action becomes surreal or reflects inner realities, as when the boy morphs from the wall, or the odd talk about him feeling a colour at the end (when he seems to be homeless). You do get the impression here that Bond is pursuing some bigger statement than the rather banal story ostensibly portrays, but it also feels half formed. Then again, as a work designed to get young audiences thinking and talking about what they’ve seen, it is undoubtedly successful.
A Window opens with a couple near the end of their relationship; he’s a parasite, she wants to sleep on her own for some peace. It turns out she is pregnant, and in second scene the boy has grown into a mugger who robs to feed his mother’s drug habit. She hangs herself, and in the third scene the father returns for a confrontation with his son. There’s a running theme of blindness (a window is, after all, something you see through) - all of the characters seem blind to anything which might help their wretched situations. There are no answers, just a series of scenes in which people wrestle with their anxieties. Probably the best play in the book.
The Edge has a young man encountering an old derelict on the street, and then being followed home by the bitter old man who accuses him (falsely) of stealing his wallet. At home, the lad and his Mum are in the middle of an ongoing dispute about the travel he is about to depart on. The old man’s bitterness towards the young and the reconciliation of the relationship between mother and son become intertwined.
Some of the plays - Innocence, A Window, The Edge - contain the kind of tense, intense dramatic situations, full of menace and imminent violence, which is Bond’s forte. A number of the plays are compromised by Bond’s politics - he resorts to writing pantomime villains - but at their best, they contain both moments of intense drama and open questions about life. There’s a tendency to portray people who cannot, or will not, take a measured, informed view of their situation. Bond might say that in a mad society, who can? But often his temperature-taking feels somewhat forced. The shorter plays in the book are a good selection of the work he has done for the Birmingham-based young people’s theatre company, Big Brum.
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July 12, 2014uncompromising work by uncompromising writer.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews