Plays 10: Dea / The Testament of this Day / The Price of One / The Angry Roads / The Hungry Bowl

Plays #10

by Edward Bond

Bond 10 brings together recent work by the writer of the classic stage plays Saved , Lear, The Pope's Wedding and Early Morning . The volume comprises four previously unpublished plays, one previously published play and a comprehensive introduction by the author.

Dea , a heroine, has committed a terrible act and has been exiled. When she meets someone from her past, she is forcefully confronted by the broken society that drove her to commit her crimes. In this play, Edward Bond takes from the Greek and Jacobean drama the fundamental classical problems of the family and war to vividly picture our collapsing society. Dea received its premiere at Sutton Theatre in 2016.

The Testament of this Day is Edward Bond's third original radio drama. A young man embarks on two journeys, though he is in control of only one. He soon discovers there is no going back, from either. The play is an arresting drama about the world today and was first produced by BBC Radio 4 in 2016.

The Price of One is set in among city ruins in a war zone. An occupying soldier carries a baby he has rescued from the rubble and dust. He meets a woman carrying a baby of her own. What ensues is a struggle between two enemies demanding justice in the midst of war. A modern tragedy, this play is an exploration of eternity and madness and the supermarket culture. It received its premiere in 2016.

The Angry Roads considers how young people today grow up in a world that their parents never knew. In a flat a teenage boy is sorting through play things from his childhood; he is sorting through his past in search of the truth about an accident that destroyed his family. The Angry Roads was commissioned by Big Brum Theatre Company and premiered in 2015.

The Broken Bowl is a portrait of a a ghost town. Outside a harsh wind rattles the windows. Inside, people go hungry and start boarding up their homes. When a young girl insists on feeding her imaginary friend, a bitter struggle for a future ensues for the power of the imagination to transform lives. The play is a moving and audacious modern fable that explores the impact of hard times on family life, commissioned by Big Brum and premiered in 2012.

The volume features an introduction by the author that looks at theatre and culture in a post-Brexit referendum, post-truth and post-Trump era.

232 pages, Paperback

Published January 11, 2018

About the author

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

Reviews

[Bookthesp1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any writer who publishes his tenth volume of collected plays must have an established style (to escape or eschew) and either be ignored or forgotten, or conversely due a revival. Edward Bond used to be commissioned by and performed on National platforms. Plays such as Saved, The Fool and Bingo are established modern (troubled?) classics, but classics all the same. Indeed, Dominic Dromgoole in his book, The Full Room, says of the early period that he had produced a “tranche of work that no other post-war writer has bettered”. Dromgoole says this because in recent years “his work is afforded so little attention” in his home country whilst being hailed abroad, particularly in Brechtian Germany.
Plays 10 perhaps confirms his home -grown marmite status, containing the main offering of Dea (his own modern take on Medea) and four other pieces commissioned for radio or regional theatres such as Big Brum in Birmingham. Reading these plays in the age of Covid and an unexpected horrible war in the Ukraine adds some sort of piquant relevance perhaps to the war-torn desolate landscapes and myriad atrocities that populate these Bond plays to answer the rhetorical question in the back cover blurb: “to be sane or not to be sane and if not to be mad and all that follows”.
Despite this seeming relevance this reviewer found reading these texts hard going, perhaps as Bond would want, in all his Brechtian didacticism. Bond seems obsessed with killing babies on stage (echoes of Saved); none of that Greek off stage violence here. There is a preponderance of abusive, deeply physical and often sexual stage violence not seen since Sarah Kane who he seems to want to outdo. This demands considerable acting and directing skill seemingly absent from the premiere of Dea which some reviewers condemned as “awful” and “bonkers”: with Bond as writer and director descending into “self-parody”. The question was asked, “Is Dea the most extreme play in London?” and the answer for some was that instead, it was full of “mind numbing dullness”. On the page it is somewhat turgid and repetitive though at least one reviewer saw potential in its “genre shredding, audience baiting, rhetorical drama...not a dull evening at the theatre”. I quote reviews since plays are not just meant to be passively read. Bond came to fame exactly because his work was in the context of Theatre as a moral space.
All the plays in this collection are in part about mothers, sons and fathers in conflict, sometimes within an epic theatre setting- some taking in a smaller canvas where the dialogue has more opportunity to sparkle, particularly in his play for radio, The Testament of this Day and the haunting stage piece, The Hungry Bowl. Bond often uses double characters (sets of brothers in Dea, the first dispatched bloodily almost immediately) and as an imaginary friend in The Hungry Bowl. This duality allows a sort of double take on things whilst also suggesting that insanity is sometimes the only correct response.
However, in ploughing through these plays, it is possible that Bond may be running out of steam (he’s reached the age of 88), though in truth other directors than Bond, less invested in every word, might be able to conjure much power from pruned versions of these somewhat rambling pieces. Would they be useful in an A level classroom? - possibly and not just for theatre but all sorts of trigger warnings might be needed and Drama teachers might prefer to use Sarah Kane, Jez Butterworth or others or go back to Bonds own early astounding pieces for exemplars.
Plays 10 breaks little new ground and may not be his finest hour – not to say Edward Bond groupies won’t love it all the same and the recent atrocities in Europe suggest we still need Bonds moral vision