Kate Katafiasz - Kate was Programme Leader for Drama at Newman University, Birmingham. She retired in 2022.
Edward Bond loved actors, and he had the highest respect for audiences - he couldn’t bear it if he felt they were being lied to. The work had to be logical and honest; this made him challenging to work with - but it was always worth rising to that challenge. Not everyone did or could. He was a dramatist who constantly worked on what he said was the Greeks ‘dazzling new art form’ - and spent his life trying to make it adequate to the desperate needs of our era of nuclear weapons and climate crisis. During this time theatre, like everything else, was being mined for profit; people who worked in it were demeaned as ‘luvvies’. Bond understood the art form in a way few did; his plays offer disconcerting lapses between what we see and what we hear, destabilizing our sense of physical unity - our identity. He wanted audiences to put things together privately, bodily, and to recreate themselves in the process. So often, still, people compare him to Brecht. But his plays never break the fourth wall to harangue audiences who can’t answer back. Some of his later work for young people bends theatrical boundaries in interesting ways but they never rupture them as postdramatic theatre does. Sometimes his plays stage hallucinations but you never confuse stage with auditorium, or think its fictional events are real. That’s what I mean by respect.
Edward Bond was quintessentially a dramatist. He spent his life unremittingly working on drama - on its ability to change us, to change society. We will all feel his loss.
Jeremy Warr, Freelance Theatre Arts Worker, Co. Durham
I was in touch with Edward for a few years in the mid 80's. He was extremely generous with his time and his work. While a drama student I spent a whole day with him, working through a long series of questions about almost every play he'd written up to then; all of which he answered with his usual calm, impassioned clarity. Afterwards we corresponded about the plays he was then writing - his were either pithy paragraphs typed on blank postcards, or draft scripts with an honest request for feedback. He also gave me permision to put on the first production (after the RSC's premiere) of 'Red Black & Ignorant' - the first of the War Plays Trilogy - when I was the Director at Sheffield Crucible's Youth Theatre.
His understanding of what theatre could and should do, and his skill and technique in how a play can be together, have been a huge influence on my own approach, and still are. And I'm still rereading his plays forty years later.
(That first day I met him, when I arrived in his Cambridgeshire village, I stopped a local man and gave him the name of the house to get directions. "Ah" he said slowly - "that will be Mr Bond" as he pointed to the house. I've always wondered since what the locals made of having this intense and intensely political playwright in their midst!)
Adrian Buckle Unifaun Theatre Productions, Malta
I met Edward Bond in 2001 when, on the initiative of the local Education Division, he came to Malta to lead some workshops in his plays and theatre ideology. I admit I had not heard about him before and so attended these workshops without knowing what to expect.
The first workshop I attended was held at the University of Malta for students and Drama teachers. I attended as one of a handful of Drama teachers employed with the Education Division of Malta. My colleagues found his ideas and methodology too radical, some said they were too negative and too violent. On the other hand, I was enthralled. It was in those days that I was toying with the idea of branching into Theatre Production but did not know exactly what kind of theatre I wanted to do. I remember though that I was tired of what was being staged in Malta at the time as I found it far too safe and commercial. Edward's work hit me like a thunderbolt. Here were plays that spoke about the truth of our times, that challenged the status quo and that engaged with the soul. I attended all his workshops in Malta.
I was then a member of a local amateur Drama club and I quickly asked them to direct AT THE INLAND SEA for them. However, the committee of the club, after reading the play, told me that I would not find an audience for the play and that it was too different from their style.
I ended up forming my own theatre company, Unifaun Theatre Productions in 2005. The effect of my productions was immediate as people flocked to my plays and thus changed the Theatre landscape in Malta. I introduced Malta to playwrights like Mark Ravenhill, Philip Ridley and Martin McDonagh, none of who were ever performed locally.
It took me until 2013 to garner courage to produce a Bond play. I met then Big Brum Artistic Director Chris Cooper, who was in Malta on invitation of the British Council to work in schools on Edward's methodology. On learning who he was I discussed with him the idea of producing a Bond play in Malta and we finally decided that the play should be OLLY'S PRISON.
OLLY'S PRISON was met with scepticism by the local reviewers. THey described it as "violent" and not adapted to a Maltese audience. I had invited Edward to Malta to view the opening of the show. After the First Night we held a Q&A with Edward in the theatre. Someone in the audience challenged Edward that his plays were unlawful and that we were meant to observe the Law. I remember that an until then quiet Edward Bond suddenly sprang to life and shouted at his interlocutor, "Auschwitz was lawful! Does it make it Just?" A silence pervaded the room but those words continued to mark my admiration for him.
I kept in touch with Edward after that through email and finally convinced the local national theatre to commission him to write a new play for Malta. The result was THE PRICE OF ONE, a wonderful parable of Madness provoked by Violence and War. It was the first time that a playwright of Edward's calibre was commissioned in Malta and audiences flocked to the theatre. This time the reception was warmer and audiences understood the true greatness of the man.
Edward later commented on the play: "The play that you commissioned for your theatre. Inevitably I had forgotten parts of it and its total effect. Re-reading it from the advantage of distance, was a revelation. I think it is a play for our times.UNIFAUN Theatre puts the London West End and the New York Broadway to shame and I really mean that. Malta can br proud of its theatre."
I went on to produce CHAIR in 2023 with a female Billie. I asked Edward to have an autistic actor play the role and he agreed. The effect was tremendous. The actress playing Billie went on to win BEST YOUNG PERFORMER at the National Arts Awards for her portrayal of the character. We had people in the audience in tears at the ending of the play. I forwarded a video recording of the play to Edward and he replied positively, making me the proudest person alive.
Edward's work has influenced me immeasurably. His notes on Drama, his plays and his poems are a beacon in the darkness of our times. We live in time where we are teetering on WW3. In my country, most companies continue to produce farces that lead to nothing and that, in Edward's words, "leave the audience more confused and numb at the end."
Edward's work shines as a beacon of hope.
I appeal to everyone to read his notes, stage his plays and pass on his work to the younger generations. It is the least we can do. We owe him that much.
Enzo Gattuccio, Playwright, New York
Edward and I never met, though over the last years of his life I was fortunate to number among his many correspondents. He was immensely generous in answering my questions about his work, and the art of drama.
I believe Edward's plays and ideas represent the most significant achievement in English-language drama of the past several centuries. In gratitude and respect, I will share a few of his insights from our letters:
Working in contemporary theatre is often frustrating. Its like being shipwrecked on a raft in an ocean. You see an Island and paddle towards it. You step onto the shore. The island sinks out of sight. You swivel round for your raft and paddle. They are disappearing over the horizon.
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It must be creepy and depressing to live in a country where Donald Trump is not in prison or a lunatic asylum but is an active politician. If he enters it again The White House should be painted black.
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Writing about drama and human theory. Collectively we face the biggest human crisis ever—all the trouble spots have become one. When I thought of writing to you it occurred to me that when a dramatist writes a play he or she casts their net into the sea to catch fish but now they catch the sea. Shakespeare and the Greeks couldnt answer the human question but they knew they knew it wasnt how much money will this make at the box office. When Shakespeare died there was a rumour he had been found drunk dead in a ditch.
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At the moment drama in the UK is in a wasteland. Drama and democracy go together – the Greeks knew that drama creates the form of human subjectivity that is necessary for civilized society, for democracy. But we now have Trump, Boris Johnson, Truss (if you’ve heard of her) and the political gangsters, drug and financier crooks who run almost everywhere in the world. [...] I wrote Human Cannon especially for the main stage of the National Theatre in London but the Artistic Director decided to stage Guys and Dolls instead.
Françoise Gomez - Arts and cultural education advisor, Paris
One day, for some reason, I pushed open the door of the Racine cinema and bought a ticket for a film: Walkabout, by Nicolas Roeg. This story of Western children abandoned by a mad father in the middle of the Australian desert, rescued and then initiated by a young aborigine, could have been a kitschy eco-bluette. But it was astonishingly profound, and the dialogue sounded like Euripides. I remember staying with my pencil in my hand to note the name of the scriptwriter: a certain Edward BOND. Edward Bond, with whom I would later have the chance to talk, as Pascal Charvet and I were going to put him through "baccalauréat"'s theater programs. Thanks to Alain Françon in France, he was one of the greatest dramatic explosions of the last twentieth century. A great voice fighting for peace and social justice. As I walk up the aisles of the Hiroshima Peace Park, it is his work that I hear and see. This eulogy comes as no surprise, because Edward has just died. It's a mourning for anyone who sees theatre as something other than "entertainment". So for us.
Lisa Bolgar
I grew up in Great Wilbraham and met Edward in 1968 when I was 15. For the next 3 years he was my mentor. I had been at the convent school in Cambridge since the age of 5 and my ideas had been shaped by the nuns. (As well as by my father, an academic, and by EM Forster) Edward gently challenged every idea I had. I would go to his house, walk his dogs and then sit by him as he talked, discussed ideas, read to me and played records. He taught me about his plays, his ideas and views on society.He played me numerous classical records moving into John Tavener's The Whale. Not surprisingly the nuns were alarmed by the changes and complained to my father that I was trying to be an undergraduate before my time.
For me it was a wonderful privilege to know Edward. I am incredibly proud of the memories he has given me.
Lewis Frost
I first met Edward Bond at the National Association for the Teaching of Drama conference in October 1989. I was working with the Actors Group theatre company at the time and following that with the Dukes Theatre in Education Company, which like many others was soon under threat of closure. He gave a key input to the conference - “a potted history of drama”, it was a history of how society has organised itself. It was fascinating and it had the effect of making one see drama’s current situation with a newness and urgency. His conference speech provoked and inspired in equal measure. I started exploring his essays and notes, and I began writing myself, not a play at that point but a manifesto for theatre, written against a backdrop of the closure of the country’s last TIE companies. In the ensuing period Edward was to become a leading voice in the defence of theatre-in-education.
As a playwright he didn’t just concern himself with the art and craft of writing. He was as invested in every aspect of the production of the play, directing, design, through to how it would engage the audience, and what would happen in the gap in which the audience, the actors and the play met. He seemed to be continually formulating new theories of drama as though reality was always running ahead too fast, which of course in a way it was. Each new theory never superseded or invalidated the previous ones, but added to them. His older ideas and polemics are as relevant as if he’d just written them and I find myself going back to them for sustenance. He most recently thought of the audience as the play-within-the-play. It was another way of articulating the new drama he understood we so desperately need. The audience, being the ‘play-within-the-play’, is how the meaning of their daily lives comes into the gap, it’s how they give the drama “its vulnerable objectivity, it’s cultural presence”, (prompted I believe by Hamlet where the play within the play communicates the truth of the situation), something which he felt that the entertainment industry shuts out from its stories.
By this time, (I won’t say late in his career, he would despise that term) Bond had already parted company with the mainstream of English theatre, even though he had produced writing widely acknowledged as among the best in post-war Britain. It was after the RSC put on his play the Great Peace (1985), which he said was a “grotesquely bad production” that was the last straw according to him. He began to think that the English main stages could not be trusted to perform his work as he envisaged it and decided to focus on productions in France and Germany. The exception to this was his long collaborative relationship with Big Brum whom he wrote for, and which is where I saw his later work performed. Big Brum’s stage was one of the few places where you could see his work produced in the UK.
More recently in 2019, I staged a production of his play, ‘Have I None’. We began a regular correspondence. I found Edward’s generosity towards new writers and directors, underscored his passion and striving for a new form of drama. But I believe that it was also that he simply wanted to be useful as an artist, to theatre practitioners and his audiences. His depth of feeling led him to be regarded by some as too serious and a little po-faced or worse. But he regarded humour and comedy as importantly as intelligence in what makes us human, and saw himself as a comic writer. In fact, the farcical nature of ‘Have I None’ was one of the principal reasons I enjoyed working with actors on it.
Edward’s rigour and exactitude when channelled into his directing work was not always appreciated by some actors. Whilst I never had a first-hand experience of his directing in the rehearsal room, I suspect he was operating in an entirely different paradigm from the more conventional modes many actors are used to. I would have loved to have seen him direct one of his plays, not least because as he said, questions about acting technique could only really be answered in the rehearsal room. After I sent him the reviews I received from my first staging of ‘Have I None’, he picked up on one which referred to me as an ‘actor’s director’. This is what he wrote to me.
“I see from the review that you are an actor’s (sic) director. (Read actors’). You couldn’t be more highly praised. Please pass my thanks and congratulations to the actors and company.” His playful shifting of the punctuating apostrophe to the possessive in “Read actors’ ”, hinted I suspect at a very different approach.
In November 2022 I spent a morning in conversation with Edward Bond on camera. This was in advance of a further staging of ‘Have I None’ and the film was to be screened after each performance. He answered my many questions with gravitas and humour. His reactions were often unpredictable, he was always on his guard against the habitual behaviour of others, which he understood as a product of society’s implicit ‘training’. He didn’t challenge or provoke for the sake of it, but he did to take an impish delight in contradicting the conventional wisdom.
“Shakespeare changed my life, I’d ban him”. He grabs your attention with that statement. But did he really just say that? He chuckles as if he has surprised himself as much as you and then goes deeper to elaborate the why of it.
“Shakespeare couldn’t possibly ask the right questions as the world has changed so much . . . . why were there no world wars before World War One? Because the situation didn’t make them, the situation has changed therefore Shakespeare can’t really ask the questions that are important for us today.” He was frequently paradoxical in this way, by his own admission often deliberately so. “Listen to the audience, respect the audience and don’t entertain them. So that’s what I believe… no I don’t, because I (myself) like being entertained.” His programme notes were littered with paradoxes and reversals, frustrating for some, but for many including me, they were markers of the rich trails which could be followed.
With all his theorising I never found Bond’s plays to be didactic. He himself never claimed to have all the answers, but he was most alert to and never turned away from the problems that are so commonly ignored. He leaves behind a tremendous body of written plays, letters, notes and essays on theory. He died in the saddle, with plans to pen a new series of comedies. He said, there is still so much that he has to write and share. He is irreplaceable. It is a huge loss.
Benjamin May
When a friend emailed me to say Edward had died, I didn’t believe it. Absurd. How could Edward be dead? How could that be possible? If he had died that would mean a young undergraduate would never again open a typed letter from the playwright he had studied at 6th form college with total surprise. That would mean the author of one of our most seminal plays, the play that changed the censorship laws in this country, would never again sit in a small amateur theatre and give notes to the actors about the words he had written. That would mean the patron of a young people’s theatre company would never again come and see their work nor write a stunning programme note for the audience. That would mean that the teacher who was working on the role of objects with his year 10 drama students would never again get the most insightful email about how objects interrogate people not visa versa. That would mean we’d never again hear the husband chuckling about how him and his wife got chocolates whilst travelling through Paris in a hurry. That would mean the young undergraduate who grew up to become a teacher, director, partner and father would never again receive the Christmas poem from Great Wilbraham he looked forward to. Yes, it’s absurd that none of these things will happen again. Edward has died but these moments are alive today in all that he did. In the letters he wrote, in the actors’ notes he gave, in the young people’s theatre companies he supported, in the classrooms he inspired and in the plays he wrote and yes in those many many relationships he had both near and far.
May his brilliance, rigor and rage be cherished and championed by us all. Edward, thank-you.
Wesley Ralston
Watching The Broken Bowl as a teenage secondary school student was my opening to Edward Bond and The Big Brum plays. Yet, I had no idea who Edward was at that point. Fast forward several years to studying Drama at Newman University and thank you to my lecturer Kate Katafiasz I was introduced once again to Bond’s work. We started to study his works and his comments on the fractures of society. As a result, all the memories of The Broken Bowl’s simple, effective set, the brilliant four actors and the character Girl running out into the world beyond the stage hoping for change came flooding back. I could never articulate at school why the play impacted me like it did. Only now I think I saw myself in that character and I am grateful to Edward for this gap to explore who I was.
I also sit here feeling very lucky that Bond came and delivered a workshop at Newman and I could then send my questions to him afterwards. To get a response that was honest and inspiring shaped my dissertations and has fed into every venture I have taken on since. When I read Edward had died, I was numb. As I write this, I am hopeful… as there are so many who are, and so many to come who will be, inspired by Bond’s legacy. I will forever en-act for Drama’s potential because of Edward Bond. Thank you Edward.
Rit Chattapadhyay
Edward, my friend
I first read Edward's Saved as a postgraduate student in the enlivening classes of Dr. Siddhartha Biswas in room number 23 at University of Calcutta.
My life changed from that moment. As a kid who had never been able to fit in, who had been bullied in myriad ways, whose heart had been broken into pieces and then stomped on, and who saw only human insensitivity all around him, I could understand why a group of men could stone a baby to death. I was not shocked, I was relieved that there was somebody who knew me.
After my Master's, I enrolled in an M.Phil programme. My only objective was to work on Edward Bond's drama. As I began studying Coffee and dived deep into the world of the greatest maverick artist of our times, I was fascinated. As I read and read, I began to have certain questions. I found Edward's website and there was a contact email. I had thought that this would be one of this contact email addresses that are created to never reply to anybody. Yet, I took a chance and sent a few questions to the email address.
Edward was never like the other authors. He replied with elaborate explanations. We started communicating back and forth, and soon Edward gave me his personal email address. He became my friend and my confidante. Soon, we started discussing so many things apart from drama: but all related to the question of humanness. He appreciated my understanding of his plays and the insight I had into his plays. When Covid hit, I was, like others, enmeshed in professional and emotional crises, and Edward stood by me, inspired me, and told me things I did not believe about myself. I would always remember how he wrote to me that most people do not have my understanding of his plays.
Edward believed in young people. He believed in their sense of justice and their innocence. And, from my experience in teaching Saved in postgraduate classes, I can let the world know that young adolescents, undergraduate, and postgraduate students also understand Bond. He speaks a language that is far beyond the understandings of people who have already conformed to ideology. He speaks the language of imagination; uncorrupted, unhindered, and radically free. To me, he will always be light at the end of a dark and disturbing world. He was and always will be friend, Edward.
I will try my best to take the works of my friend to the world, and that will be my greater purpose.
Richard Holmes, Artistic Director of Big Brum TIE
(This article was first published in National Drama's magazine of professional practice, Drama vol 30.2, Summer 2024.)
“Our culture is a stone sandwich and young people are the filling” - Edward Bond
I recently wrote on a Big Brum social media post, after hearing of Edward Bond’s passing, that ‘Edward was magnificent’ … and he was. Edward had a magnificent imagination that his magnificent mind negated into magnificent plays and dramas for audiences for over 60 years. For many he was the greatest playwright of his generation, others saw him as the greatest playwright for more than several generations, and for some he was the modern Shakespeare.
But however one saw him, I think that I would be right in saying that we understood his death to be a irreplaceable loss to Drama and theatre, a loss when we need good meaningful drama, more than ever.
The current world situation is grim and particularly for the young. Many young people will only ever have experienced a state of perpetual crisis, which has now become built into their way of life. As I wrote in ‘Drama’, Spring 2023, young people are the most human people on the planet , their
“…nature is to question, to be tender, and social, to be creative as well be imaginative, but there is a danger that this is being knocked out of them as a matter of course.”
This lurching from crisis to crisis, which is built into our society, is designed to inhibit, and corrupt the young’s basic nature, corrupting any ability to clearly to see and understand the world situation, and their own situation. For Edward, this perversion leads us ultimately to behave less humanly. Edward, in a letter to big Brum reflecting on the second of the ten plays he wrote for us, said:
Actors may indulge their emotions on the stage, but ordinary people are rarely able to do this. They do it sometimes, but then they often do it self-destructively - they tear themselves and each other - and this is because they are not allowed to express emotion in the normal cause of their lives in their normal social situations. Thoreau’s observation that people live lives of quiet desperation is true - it’s the form alienation takes. But he should have added that this quietness erupts into anger against others and the self. So we should always say: How do people behave in this situation, how does the situation use them?
(Edward Bond, Letter to Big Brum, November 1997)
For Bond, human history, society, and culture were all predicated on the human need to seek Justice - and none more than the young. He felt that modern theatre had lost its way, distracted by the market, and was either obsessed with showing injustice at best or could only lie or dazzle with effects and gimmicks, or become flag waving political lectures at worst.
His plays are child centred because he understood that young people deserve drama that speaks to their situation, drama that takes them seriously and that evokes their imagination in order that they could seek reason.
When something is “wrong “with children, we “cure” them or punish them. It’s a question which does them (and us) more harm! By “ wrong” I mean disaffected, anti-social, violent. Such children cannot be “cured” because their behaviour is not a symptom of disease. The disaffection is deeper than any illness. And it would be difficult for any child not to fall into one of more of its categories because collectively the categories describe our society. The disaffection comes from their understanding that, in one or more ways, our society denies them the right to their full humanity. T.I.E. (Theatre in Education) does not cure or punish.”
Letter from Edward in support of the Belgrade TIE company)
Edward believed that we are not made human by our reason or cleverness:
“Reason ran the train schedules to Auschwitz and its builders were clever.”
He argued instead that
“We are made human by our imagination. It is the source of our values, the faculty through which we create ourself by gaining self-autonomy and responsible social affiliation.’”
Young people are imagination in action, and so must be the drama that they engage with. Because for him, “when the imagination is not creative, it must be destructive”
Bond wanted his young audiences to be enactive, to feel, enter the story’s situation , and in doing so they would meet themselves in the story, meet their situation. Edward once told me that the hardest plays he’d written involved writing for young people. They had to be right. He didn’t want to write down to them: if anything, the plays for school needed to be better than those he wrote for adults, because young audiences know when they are being patronised and they smell a lie quickly .
This sensibility underpinned the collaboration with Big Brum in the series of remarkable plays, 10 altogether, that were challenging to its audiences .
“ I try to listen carefully and watch carefully and think carefully. I want to speak for some who can’t - and often I say things they think they don’t want to say or be said. I would try to write a text that would expose problems and challenges audiences to discover what they themselves think.”
(From a letter to Big Brum in 1994, accepting the first commission to write for the company)
“Our culture is a stone sandwich and young people are the filling.” (From a letter to Big Brum in 2000)
These words from Bond have always stuck with me, and for me sums him up in a sentence. It is poetic and political, it is wonder-full. I find myself as the stone, I feel my petrification, but I also meet my younger self. I am both consumer (the stone sandwich )and consumed (once the filling ). This short sentence quakes with the profundity that is all our lived situation. It is the modern age of neo-liberalism: this is the situation young people find themselves in.
There was a lot of coverage by and in the media after Edward died. The cynicism towards him was most tangible here. The coverage of his theoretical writing or work with and for young people was woeful, as if it was an embarrassing blip. But it wasn’t: he was gifted the ability to write for, I think, the audiences he always wanted to write for, the most disaffected and disenfranchised, the working class. Like him.
The theatre world was uncomfortable around Bond. It respected him for his brilliance but rejected him as difficult, uncompromising, and too demanding, and he was at times all of these things but as someone who worked with him as an actor , for 16 years , it was precisely these qualities as well as his creativity , generosity and remarkable insight that made his plays extraordinary . Bond and Big Brum were interested in developing a new form of drama that saw acting as searching for the situation ‘Bondian Drama’. The schools that Big Brum tours to, are often in the most deprived parts of the country, we are working with young people who rarely if ever experience theatre, or arts of any description. There were no preconceptions, they didn’t know who Edward was , or even care. Edward liked this. He knew young people would ask and say the most profound things that get to the heart of the human crisis. He wanted to write plays for them, and Big Brum wanted to perform them.
“I feel that if Euripides came back now and sat in the National, he’d say , ‘this is rubbish’, but if he sat in a room with these kids , he’d say ‘this is what my life is about’.”
Edward Bond, writing to Big Brum after seeing work in schools with young people from an interview after a performance of The Broken Bowl (2012)
The 10 Edward Bond and Big Brum Plays :
‘At the Inland Sea’ – 1995.
‘11Vests’-1997.
‘Have I None’-2000.
‘The Balancing Act’-2003.
The Under Room’- 2005.
‘Tune’- 2006.
‘ A Window’ – 2009.
‘ The Broken Bowl’ – 2011.
‘ The Edge ‘- 2012.
‘ The Angry Roads’- 2015 .
(All published by Methuen)