Goodbye to the playwright Edward Bond, the author who told the world without sweeteners

The French media have farewelled the Englishman Edward Bond, who died on March 3 at the age of 89 in Cambridge, with the honors due to a French-speaking playwright.

The author of

,

and

, works that shook the London scene between the late 60s and early 70s, had a series of irresolvable disagreements with the state theaters of the British capital from the following decade onwards.

In 1985 he stepped down as director of

, a Royal Shakespeare Company production, and accused the company of “flirting with the tourism sector.”

Later he left the stalls during two revivals of

(one of them directed by Sam Mendes at the National Theatre), because he found both to be boring.

“English theater has become childish, it only appeals to emotions (…) We are treated as if we were children,” he complained in an interview.

The son of farmers who had to emigrate to London during the Great Depression, Bond became interested in theater because his school took him to see a Macbeth, just after the Second World War.

He worked as a paint mixer, was an assembler in a car factory and served in the military in occupied Vienna.

At the age of 21, he entered the circle of young writers at the Royal Court in London, where he premiered

(1962).

In 1965, Bond was preparing to premiere

in this same theater, but Lord Charberlain, censor of the Royal Household, refused to give him approval if he did not change a scene.

The author flatly refused and his unprecedented gesture unleashed a campaign of protests that managed to eliminate, three years later, the requirement of prior censorship, in force for more than two centuries.

During the period in which it was banned,

was the biggest international success of British theater at the time: it had thirty productions abroad.

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Bond's chair

In the scene that was inadmissible for the censor, a group of young people from the outskirts of London stoned the baby of one of them.

A previous scene where the little boy cried his eyes out while his family ignored him seemed harsher to critics.

With the protagonist triangle formed by Led, Pam and the child's father, Bond highlighted the penury, the absence of horizons and the brutalization to which working-class young people, like the author himself, were doomed.

“Writing about violence comes as naturally to me as writing about manners comes to Jane Austen,” he once said.

Starting with

, Bond then strung together a quintet of works that established him as an outstanding author of the universal theater of the second half of the 20th century:

, a grotesque satire of the Victorian court;

, written in the style of

theatre ;

, a radical update of the Elizabethan play of the same name;

, and

(1973), a portrait of an elderly Shakespeare who has become a landowner complicit in the criminalization of poverty, knowing that the new law will lead beggars to the gallows.

In many Bond works a baby appears abandoned to its fate.

The narrator of the first of his

(a seven-hour triptych successfully mounted by Alain Françon at the 1994 Avignon Festival) is an unborn person burned in the womb during a nuclear explosion.

“I am a citizen of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Bond states in one of his poems.

In his theater there is always a lacerating antagonism between some unscrupulous subjects and others who stumble towards the light.

The adventures of his characters are extreme, like that of the Greek tragic heroes, because, he says, “only by addressing the extreme can reality be understood.”

He is, however, an optimistic author: he trusts that incisive theater can change reality.

He doesn't think the London scene is along those lines: “The National Theater is a Technicolor sewer,” he even said.

Edward Bond, in 1981 outside the Royal Court Theatre.Alamy /Cordon press

Bond's work has influenced authors such as Sarah Kane, whom he supported, Mark Ravenhill and the Irishman Martin McDonagh.

In Spain it has been staged little and less edited.

Exceptions are the production of

(Salvats) starring Julio Manrique and Ariadna Gil, directed by Josep Maria Mestres in 1998 at the Lliure;

the premiere of

(Estiu) at the TNC, with Julieta Serrano and Mercedes Sampietro directed by Manel Dueso, in 2001;

or

, staged by Carlos Aladro, in 2013 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.

Since 1985, the author of

(drama about the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews, but also Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, partisans and communist militants, in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar, during the Second World War) writes plays commissioned by the Big Brum company, from Birmingham, which performs them in schools for students between 9 and 12 years old.

Several of them are set in an apocalyptic year 2077. In Granada, his friend César Villa, Founder of the Patio Edward Bond Youth Association, tries to do similar work.

Bond also composed opera scripts and film scripts, including

, nominated for an Oscar in 1966. In his opinion, it was up to Greek theater to talk about justice, because the law was unjust.

(2016), the last work he directed in England, is a radical rereading of

.

It will premiere in France in October at the Théâtre-Studio de Alfortville, on the outskirts of Paris, on the initiative of Christian Benedeti, another great supporter of the British author.