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Plays #7
Plays 7: Olly's Prison / Coffee / The Crime of the Twenty-First Century
"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
Bingo: "A magnificent play: spare, lean, poetic, yet rich in themes and ideas and full of suppressed agony and pain."-Guardian
The Fool: "Bond's carved prose must be the envy and the goal of half the playwrights in Britain."-Observer
The Woman: "A play as complex and ambitious as anything British drama has offered us for a decade ... a play with the riddling tenacity of a classic and the most inventive use of Homeric legend since Giradoux's Tiger at the Gates"-Guardian
Stone: "A vivid, assured, deceptively simple piece ... What gives Stone its force is the outraged humanity of its author, the dexterity of its language, and strength of its theatrical images. Bond is not afraid to explore the simple, and the result is a compulsive piece of theatre."-Evening Standard
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 30, 2018
I became enamoured with Bond's plays way back in probably the early 2000's when reading some of his earlier work; of course like a lot of Drama students I studied Saved, but I particularly liked plays like Early Morning, Narrow Road to the Deep North, and others of his historical plays like Bingo or Restoration.
With Lear he took on a sort of post-apocalyptic epic style that continued through works like The Woman, and The War Plays, which is where it seems to me that his work became rather too overblown and self-involved. It may be that, as has often been said, his plays only really reveal themselves in performance, but I find it hard to tell apart the plays of this type. It's this middle-period where his output really sagged for me, and this volume might even be the low point of that.
Olly's Prison is the most accessible one here, perhaps because it was written for TV it is easier to follow on the page. Coffee and The Crime of the Twenty-First Century I unfortunately found pretty much unreadable - again, they may work a lot better in performance. I didn't read the shorter plays, and I know better by now than to bother with his introductory essays, which are generally impenetrable.
Fortunately after these works Bond's plays seemed to change considerably - not to say they become suddenly lucid and easily digestible, but the plays in volumes 8 and 9 are definitely an improvement on these ones and certainly far more readable.
With Lear he took on a sort of post-apocalyptic epic style that continued through works like The Woman, and The War Plays, which is where it seems to me that his work became rather too overblown and self-involved. It may be that, as has often been said, his plays only really reveal themselves in performance, but I find it hard to tell apart the plays of this type. It's this middle-period where his output really sagged for me, and this volume might even be the low point of that.
Olly's Prison is the most accessible one here, perhaps because it was written for TV it is easier to follow on the page. Coffee and The Crime of the Twenty-First Century I unfortunately found pretty much unreadable - again, they may work a lot better in performance. I didn't read the shorter plays, and I know better by now than to bother with his introductory essays, which are generally impenetrable.
Fortunately after these works Bond's plays seemed to change considerably - not to say they become suddenly lucid and easily digestible, but the plays in volumes 8 and 9 are definitely an improvement on these ones and certainly far more readable.
Displaying 1 of 1 review