This season the Shaw Festival is producing its first take on a work by Edward Bond, a playwright who, through his uncompromising play Saved, first produced at the groundbreaking Royal Court in 1965, helped to change censorship laws in Britain. Almost fifty years later, with over fifty plays to his credit, Bond remains one of the most controversial and challenging, sometimes condemned and internationally produced, playwrights of our time. This interview took place in June of 2014
James Strecker: You started writing plays two decades after Auschwitz and Hiroshima when, “in a way the problems were behind us and we could look at the future” whereas today “the problems are in front of us and the theatre is unable to deal with them.” To begin, what are these problems we face and why isn’t theatre up to the task?
Edward Bond: If you go back say four hundred years, you can see a steady though irregular development of democracy. This was because new forms of industry depended on workers massed in cities and factories, not spread out over the land. These workers were exploited but – in spite of harassment – they were able to struggle and organize for political representation. In this way they improved the conditions of their lives. In two world wars – which were really crises in democracy – they fought and died to protect what they had gained, though this also meant dying for those who exploited them. After the Second World War they had a new confidence and created welfare states. I’m simplifying for this interview but that is the broad outline. Then thirty years ago in the 1980s this four hundred year development was stopped. This was possible because modern manufacturing was so successful it could create an enormous amount of goods, so that it could pretend it was a Utopia. So instead of struggling for democracy – that is, for human decency – people were asked to become mass consumers. Again I have to simplify, but the rich became obscenely rich and the poor became poorer. That doesn’t happen in Utopia. Eighty people own half the world’s wealth. The other half is owned by the rest of humanity. You could get eighty people into a corner of the Shaw Theatre. If you gathered the rest of humanity outside the theatre they would cover Canada. That cannot go on. Culture is always a cry for justice – it is often distorted and muffled, but if the cry was not there we would cease to be human. The eighty don’t exploit only the rest – they exploit the earth sea and sky. We are destroying the world. That doesn’t happen in Utopia. As the world gets smaller, the problems get bigger. The economy tries to solve its structural problems by destroying more of the world and putting it up for sale on the market. It is a slave market: the modern economy enslaves the world. If this goes on the world – our environment – will reject us. We consult our bank accounts as if they were oracles. Instead we have to ask ourselves what the future is. You don’t need an oracle, you need common sense. But only drama can disentangle common sense from our madness.
JS: In one of your poems from only a few months ago, you write, “I ask myself can you be happy in a world choked with madness and violence to its horizons”. You’re well known as a writer who takes an unflinching look at the inherent violence of our species, so I wonder what your answer to this question might be.
EB: The answer is yes. The happiness isn’t the glib and short-lived satisfactions you can get from the market. It is the happiness of understanding the situation and knowing that it can be changed. Otherwise happiness is superficial. You have to look reality in the face. Actually only human beings can be happy. Other animals might be from time to time “satisfied.” But in itself the fact that only we can be happy is the greatest cause of happiness. And so we have to cherish our happiness and not damn ourselves by making others unhappy, those who certainly aren’t among the “cursed eighty”.
JS: I long ago read about your play Saved in the 60s, about the scene in which the baby is stoned to death in its pram, and about the controversy that ensued including your appearance before a magistrate. So I wonder about the theatrical world into which you introduced this intense work. Did it need shaking up, did the audience need to be aroused from slumber of some kind, and is our situation today much the same?
EB: A French writer recently said that in that play – and in my subsequent plays – for the first time ever ordinary working people were put on stage with all their rights to be there and to be themselves. That is, they were made responsible for themselves and for their society. I say that their motive for murdering the baby was their nostalgia to be human. That is of course a paradox – but all drama is about the human paradox, the struggle to know ourselves, to decipher the labyrinth of human complexity. When social justice seems out of reach, people become destructive. Drama is about justice and not the law – the law allows eighty people to exploit the rest of humanity. That thought ought to keep you awake at night. It is a greater offence than murdering a child. The law is always manipulative but justice cannot manipulate. It is an imperative deep inside our “self” and drama is the only means we have of freeing it from the ramifications of social conformity.
JS: You are often enough described as uncompromising and shocking, so how do these labels feel to you? What have you wanted of your audience over the years?
EB: You refer to the negative – naturally, because the negative clouds our lives. I have had plays staged in over sixty countries. Plays I wrote years ago are still staged around the world. Last year I had a play staged at the Comedie-Francaise and at the same time in Colombia in the middle of a jungle guerrilla war. This year my play about war was staged in Japan and I have just come back from holding workshops in China – and because I was in China I wasn’t able to respond to a plea to see another of my plays in Istanbul. As drama deals with the most important problems – it’s why it figures so strikingly in the history of civilization – perhaps compromise would be wrong. Hamlet, Antigone, Hecuba did not compromise – and their writers could not compromise. If they did they could not create these people, extract them from the body of humanity. And if they hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be here because civilization would have collapsed. When I directed a new play in London three years ago, the London Times had a headline: Edward Bond’s new Evil Plays. At the same time the artistic director of London Royal Court Theatre wrote: “Edward Bond’s moral purity stops him making contact with the audience.” That is odd because my plays are never out of production. The people who now run our theatres have a problem. If I refer you back to my earlier answer, they have been in place for thirty years, but I have four hundred years behind me. That gives me a confidence.
JS: Your play The Sea was first produced at the Royal Court in 1973, so, after writing at least fifty other plays since then, what does The Sea mean to you today, first in terms of what you are saying about human beings and secondly in how the play fares as a theatrical experience?
EB: Recently I took part with someone from The Royal Shakespeare Company in a BBC programme to celebrate 400 years of Shakespeare. He asked me how we should stage Shakespeare now. I said you can’t stage him now because you are not interested in what interested him – you are interested in profiting in the market. So directors gift-wrap Shakespeare instead of interpreting him. They do not want to understand him – or Sophocles or Moliere – because if they did the audience would want to change their lives. The directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal National theatre don’t want that because it would be bad for their profits market. The last time The Royal National Theatre staged The Sea, the whizz-kid director managed only a grimy puddle. When everything is made for the market, all subtlety and paradox must be avoided because it is bad for a quick sale and so the market must degrade culture. It is a law of economics that the present market must corrupt culture.
JS: You recently said, “My plays are not commercial products, I don’t write for the market, I write for human salvation”. You also use the word “soul” in reference to humans, so I wonder what there is in people that gives you cause for hope and what there is that causes you despair.
EB: I use salvation and soul as short hand – and “salvation” was probably an ironic response to something in the question. Dostoevsky said only narrow-minded people hope. If I’m asked where the hope is in my plays I say it’s in the audience. When my plays are properly staged people tell me they find them strangely liberating. The English dramatist Mark Ravenhill sent me a letter earlier this year. He wrote: “Thank you, you continue to speak the truth in such a way that I feel in equal parts elated and frightened.” Shakespeare never despairs, that is his gift to the audience. I am often appalled, but I cannot despair.
JS: One commentator, in reference to a character in The Sea, has said that “Bond externalizes his inner homicidal maniac by imagining Hatch” and this makes me wonder: Why do you think you make some people uncomfortable about the things in themselves to which you are drawing attention?
EB: If anyone is uncomfortable about something in or about themselves, I think they would be wise to change it. We are human not because we can reason but because we have imagination. Imagination can make us mad – but without imagination we could never be human. It is imagination that enables us to enter madness and unravel it. King Lear goes mad – but when he becomes sane again he says the world is mad. It’s where we have to find our sanity. You can’t buy sanity in a market – it is created by drama. We need imagination to be sane in a mad world
JS: What purpose do reviewers and critics serve and what good or harm can they do?
EB: They are kind enough to ask people like me questions. I try to be helpful. A character in a play of mine repeatedly asks himself “Was anything done?” A critic, with an arch smile, once asked me “Was anything done?” ie, how had I used my life. I was going to ask the critic what he had done with his life since for the last thirty years most nights he had sat through an awful lot of rubbish without making any great fuss about his life being wasted for him. I didn’t ask him because it would have been impolite. Actually “Was anything done?” was said by Leonardo da Vinci. He repeatedly asked himself the question at the end of his life.
JS: What are the main difficulties you have encountered in writing plays? How does one make points that the audience does not want to address without shutting them down or alienating them into deafness?
EB: I think I’ve answered that – when they are properly staged they make the audience creative. I never judge an audience at one of my own plays. However, that they have paid for their seat does not mean they have purchased the right to ask me to patronize them. Writing a play is a difficult pleasure. I hope they will share the pleasure.
JS: One has to take care with causal links in biography, but I do wonder how your childhood affected you as a writer. You were born lower working class, lived through the bombings of London in 1940 and 1944, you were evacuated during the war, left school at fifteen, all the while educating yourself, especially in theatre. How do we see that background in your plays?
EB: I regard all that as an exemplary education.
JS: Regarding some of the comments I’ve read about you in the press, I find them vaguely derogatory and almost dismissive, yet at the same time one can read that “Edward Bond is one of the most respected playwrights living today” and “Bond is broadly considered one among the major living dramatists”. Any explanation to this contradiction?
EB: The word is divided into the politics of left and right. And you also have to share the world with the fanatical and the bored and indifferent. Sometime I shrug with one shoulder, sometimes with two.
JS: What were the most important events in your life as a playwright?
EB: The most important event is the play I am currently writing. And after that, the next play.
JS: Why did you turn to directing your plays? What have you learned from that experience over the years?
EB: I was fortunate in having my first plays directed by a great English director. In fact he was the greatest English director of my life time. He illuminated my life. I started to direct my work when the market took over and directors became shop-window dressers. The most important part of drama isn’t writing but acting. The writer sets up situations for the actor to use. My professional satisfaction is in writing good parts for actors. That really accounts for the contradiction in some responses to my plays: they may want to hate everything about me but they have to relish the parts I write for actors. I suppose it’s annoying when you are moved or amused by someone you want to regard as an enemy. I am really a comic writer. Any good tragic writer has to be. It goes back to your question about happiness. Being able to tell jokes well is the mark of being human – can you imagine Hitler telling a joke? I live from the creativity of actors. Guru directors who rely on tricks and stunts and “effects” can destroy actors. Drama occurs when – without interventions – the actor looks the audience straight in the eye and the audience aren’t blinded by banal lighting effects.
JS: You have said, “If my plays are acted properly, they are affirmative of humanness” and I wonder, in turn, what three plays of yours you would like to see next produced, say at the Shaw Festival which is this summer featuring The Sea?
EB: Any three.
JS: What are your reasons for writing for younger people and working with them?
EB: Children are intensely creative. Teachers sometimes tell the actors in the children’s theatre company that I write for (I’ve written them ten plays): “The children won’t understand that, it’s too difficult. They can’t even sit still.” After the performance they are surprised by the children’s concentration and perceptiveness. I wrote a play for children to act in themselves – they had to improvise some of the parts. Afterwards the head teacher told me: “I’ve been teaching children for twenty-five years and I never knew they could do that.” Later, when instead of life-problems children are confronted with business-problems and survival-problems, their creativity may be forced out of them so they can find a place in the market. It is a tragedy. Our market-society is afraid of creativity because it always involves the moral imperative – the market wants cunning, ingenuity, contrivance. It can’t distinguish between creation and destruction. An economist boasted that the market was creatively destructive. He is highly respected. He probably thought Auschwitz was a maternity hospital. I don’t exaggerate when I say our society is mad.
JS: What differences have you found over time between British actors and those on the continent? What about differences between the publics in Britain and that in Europe?
EB: I’ve written my last fifteen or so major plays for a National Theatre in France. The French have a sense of the wider cultural value of drama. If the ground is opening up at their feet, they expect drama to notice and not tell the audience to look the other way. So drama becomes more dynamic. It becomes essential again. English speaking audiences are patronized by Hollywood and TV -they are the market at its most insidious and disintegrating. Their scripts use the language and imagery of advertising, and their plots are disguised sales gimmicks. Three years ago when Luca Ronconi staged one of my plays in Milan, he was anxious I would find the production “too Italian!” It was very Italian! – but the actors knew what the play was about and it worked wonderfully in the Italian translation. In England, the Royal Shakespeare Company can’t even play Shakespeare in English – any more than the bankers in the city can be honest, since they are both integrated in the same culture. The effects of bankers’ swindling are obvious – but culture can conceal its offences because it can corrupt the means of perception and judgment. Drama is the great art of the English language, what music is to Germany and painting to France. And when the English degrade their drama, they degrade the core of their culture and their moral reality. They bury four centuries of democracy for the sake of their bank balances.
JS: You have called Cameron, your Conservative prime minister, “a profoundly ignorant and destructive person” and, since we too in Canada have a much-criticized Conservative prime minister who causes much concern, have you any suggestions how theatre might serve as a remedy to undesirable politicians?
EB: From what you tell me about your prime minister, I should think if I took him to one of my plays he would spend the time propping up the bar till he fell off it. I would happily give Cameron a free ticket for any of my plays, preferably one of the longer ones, because at least for that time he would be distracted from making the poor poorer and the city of London more vicious
JS: Thanks for the interview. I appreciate your insights very much. And, in anticipation of your 80th birthday on July 18, I wish you a very satisfying occasion.