Plays 6: The War Plays / Choruses from After the Assassinations

Plays #6

by Edward Bond

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 contemporary cultural corruption and conditioning. In play two the demoralised inheritors of a ravaged earth try to rationalise an existence predicated on death. The third play enlarges the issues by focussing on a post-apocalyptic Mother Courage for whom schizoid suffering becomes a survival technique." (Time Out). In Choruses From After The Assassinations, Bond forecasts questions fifty years into the future, in an age of escalating militarism.

Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

Genres: Plays

420 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 1998

About the author

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bond

Reviews

[Phil Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The War Plays opens with one of the strongest opening scenes in modern drama. Bond uses language like a weapon, to stunning effect. Red, Black and Ignorant (part 1) gives way to part two, entitled The Tin Can People, in which Bond paints a post-apocalyptic picture many will find familiar. His writing begins to drag somewhat here, interspersed with moments of brain-shaking violence and ethical questions. Part 3, Great Peace, continues in that vein. It feels too long for its own good at times, but Bond gets it together for the final moments, in which his words (particularly his stage directions) are again weaponized.

The War Plays are similar in structure to every post-apocalyptic work: some great violence (Red, Black, and Ignorant: "if what happens seems such that human beings would not allow it to happen you have not read the histories of your times") leading to bands of survivors struggling with no civilization remaining (The Tin Can People), then a painful rebuilding (Great Peace). Sure, it is a worn-out formula now, but Bond, writing in 1985, does it pretty close to perfectly.