Edward Bond tells Terry Grimley that he is dissatisfied with the current state of British drama.
Edward Bond was one of the major British dramatists to emerge in the 1960s, and his new plays used to be produced by the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
So how come his latest, A Window, is the seventh to be premiered by Big Brum, a small theatre-in-education company based in Castle Vale?
“There were two stories to that,” says Bond, at the outset of a lengthy telephone interview which he embarks upon with some reluctance, but soon appears to warm to.
“The most straightforward is that I was asked. I have written quite a lot about what drama and theatre is about. People had obviously read that and got in contact. I had already written plays for young people: that was one thing and it developed from there.
“The other thing is that I became extremely dissatisfied with drama in this country. Theatres have become what I call ‘show shops’. There are obviously exceptions, but I’m thinking about theatres I used to work with. What they want you to do is write ‘shop shows’ for ‘show shops’. I don’t want to do that because it just doesn’t interest me. If you want to do that why not go and sit by a pool in Hollywood?
“What I did was I discovered certain conditions in France. That’s where I’ve based my work for the last 20 years. I’m told the only other playwright who is performed there more than me is Molière, which is extraordinary. But they use drama in a different way, and I’m much more at home there.”
It’s no secret that Bond, now 75, is widely regarded in the theatre world as a difficult man. In fact, former Royal Court artistic director Max Stafford-Clark described him as the most difficult he had worked with in 40 years. But Bond is unrepentant.
“It’s a shame, it’s a great pity. And I did try. I’ve had plays done quite recently in the West End. For instance, they did this play of mine, The Sea, at the Haymarket. I didn’t go and see it. I left during the rehearsals. I walked out very politely.
“I don’t row. I have a reputation for being antagonistic, but I don’t argue. I think they expect an argument in which they can prove they’re right.”
Bond draws a distinction between theatre, which is entertainment, and drama, which is a tool for helping us understand the world. Both, he maintains, have been hampered by bad direction over the last 25 years.
“Theatre no longer means anything, so you get a series of effects and you’re supposed to say ‘Oh, golly, gosh!’
“And people do, but that’s not what drama was created for. The Greeks still inform anything we do in our theatre, and that means what goes on the main stage of the National Theatre or in a school in Birmingham.
“That is derived from 70 or 80 years of drama that took place in Athens....that’s the time between the Second World War and now: what have we done in that time?
“That’s why in this country and in France I work in young people’s theatre. The world is heading into places that we have no previous experience of and no precedents for dealing with. How are young people today being prepared to face these problems that are coming over the horizon?
“What I find in this country is that the most useful theatre is theatre for young people, because young people are still not completely plugged into the social/cultural economy we have. ‘Shop shows’ are all about commercialism. Children and young people are continuously fed gadgetry. If you swim in the sea you get wet, so young people start trying out the culture they are part of.”
A Window is a short play but one which spans many years in the lives of its three characters – a single mother, her estranged partner and their son, who becomes a drug dealer.
It’s a grim picture of a dysfunctional underclass, but this is nothing new in Bond’s writing. Even in the mid-1960s, when England was purring with self-satisfaction at winning the World Cup and seizing international leadership in popular culture, his gaze was focused on the underclass long before the term had passed into common use.
His 1965 play Saved enjoyed special notoriety at a time when the conservative press, in a moral panic over the permissive society, was finding plenty to be outraged about in the new British theatre.
Its fury was concentrated on a famous scene in which a baby is stoned to death by youths. The assumption appeared to be that the play was advocating stoning babies – by which logic King Lear is a play which advocates blinding old men.
Bond laughs when I remind him of this furore.
“My agent says he still gets more requests for that play than any of my others. We get a request once a week, but I won’t let them do it in this country now. They will turn it into a horror show. They did it at the Royal Court and it was rubbish. A performance will completely destroy a play.”
Despite being performed under club conditions, the standard tactic for taking plays out of the legal firing line in the days of censorship, the English Stage Society was successfully prosecuted over its original production of Saved.
But it was almost the last gasp for the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which had vetted new plays for centuries. Bond’s next play, Early Morning, notorious for featuring a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, was further instrumental in breaking its back, and theatre censorship was finally abolished in Britain in 1968.
“There were good things and bad things,” Bond says of that turbulent decade. “There was, of course, a release from that authoritarian repression. You look at photographs of the working class and, except on exceptional days, they’re all in prison uniform. So that was a great step forward.
“But the other thing was that it was so facile. People were saying the world is changing, the Government is going to do this and that. I thought ‘where are you living? You don’t understand the process of change.’ I used to get criticised by the left wing, but I can’t kid myself like that.
“And then, of course, it swings the other way. Now we’re all being told by the Conservatives we’re in the same boat. It’s an obscene thing for someone to stand up on a podium and say that. If you go to a school on a working-class estate and then you go to Eton, to say those two things are in the same boat is obscene.”
To be effective, he argues, anything creative needs to be extreme. He uses the metaphor of a burning house: showbusiness will make the best of it by saying there is a rosy sky, while the purpose of drama is to get us out of the house.
Sport, where the spectators’ emotions are kicked about as haplessly as the ball, and the pursuit of self-expression also get short shrift from Bond: “Adolf Hitler was expressing himself when he was building concentration camps,” he says acidly.
A play, he argues, has to recognise the strength of the audience, because then the audience realise their own creative power to analyse what they are being presented with, and to impose their will on the problem.
“The teachers will say the kids can’t understand this, they can’t sit still for 10 minutes. But you go in and present them with something they feel has links with their stories, and they sit there with rapt attention. The concentration is so intense that it’s actually quite disturbing, because the kids are being respected and their problems are being respected.
“Theatre calls it bums on seats, they don’t call it brains on seats. What we have to say is don’t forget yourself, bring the total of yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, hopes and fears, and when that happens you get a release. You get the freedom that comes from understanding the complexities, and you are no longer a ball being kicked around on the field.”
* Big Brum Theatre in Education Company presents A Window by Edward Bond at The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from tonight until Saturday (Box office: 0121 236 4455).
