Edward Bond

Bond Plays: 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 The volume comprises four previously unpublished plays, one previously published play and a comprehensive introduction by the author.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 Hungry 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.

The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixties"Lear - "Bond's greatest (and biggest) play ... It is even more topical now and will become more so as man's inhumanity gains subtle sophistication with the twenty-first century's approach" (The Times); The Sea - "It blends wild farce with tragedy and ends with a sliver of hope ... what makes the play fascinating is Bond's bleak poetry and social comedy" (Guardian); Narrow Road to the Deep North - "His best piece so far ... No one else could have written it" (The Times); Black Mass, written for performance at an anti-apartheid demonstration: "A Georg Grosz picture come to life ... the only possible kind of artistic imagery through which to speak of such evil" (Listener); Passion - a play for CND: "Mingles comedy and high anger with absolute sureness. " (Guardian)Edward Bond is "one of our outstanding playwrights ... He is already an acknowledged classic" (Plays and Players)

One of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, Edward Bond is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. "Restoration towers like a colossus ...its stylistic wit, moral complexity and theatrical force are of the kind one associates with classic drama" (Michael Billington). In settings both historical and modern, Edward Bond's plays continue to offer a wide-ranging political and moral critique of human society and human relationships. The fourth volume of his collected works contains his plays from the late seventies and early eighties. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

One of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, Edward Bond is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. The Bundle - "A complex and marvellously written play" (The Times); Jackets - "An astonishingly powerful piece of political, polemic poetry" (Guardian); Human Cannon charts the struggle against Fascism in Spain through the stories of the village community of Estarobon; In the Company of Men, a vivid and coruscating attack on the values encapsulated by boardroom power games, was described by the RSC as "a vast meditation on the twenty-first century. "Edward Bond "is one of the two or three major playwrights - and arguably the only one - to emerge since the fifties" (Observer)

Plays Six includes some of the most acclaimed work of Edward Bond, one of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, who is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. The collection includes The War Plays and Choruses from After the Assasinations. In The War Plays (Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People, Great Peace): "Bond particularises daunting themes and subjects, but examines them within the context of every day life. His platform is a trilogy of plays that deal with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The first, - a quick, telling chronicle of a life destroyed before it ever got lived - puts forth Bond's notions of contemporary cultural corruption and conditioning. In play two the demoralised inheritors of a ravaged earth try to rationalise an existence predicated on death. The third play enlarges the issues by focussing on a post-apocalyptic Mother Courage for whom schizoid suffering becomes a survival technique. " (Time Out). In Choruses From After The Assassinations, Bond forecasts questions fifty years into the future, in an age of escalating militarism. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

The latest collection of plays by one of Europe's most important playwrights. THE CRIME OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: The past has been abolished and geography - even the sky - is changed. A woman lives in a vast desert of white rubble. A tiny group of people comes seeking a hiding place - and is exposed to the deepest questions of human existence. OLLY'S PRISON: an ordinary city flat. Evening. A man tries to talk to his daughter. She will not answer. Slowly their world turns to tragedy and a search begins that lasts for years. COFFEE: A young man alone in a room. A stranger enters. Together they journey into a dark forest...When the men return to the daylight world, they are involved in a trivial incident. It is hardly more than a gesture - yet it is something that once happened and in its triviality captures the history of our century and confronts us with the deepest questions about ourselves. "A great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright. " Independent"A play by one of Britain's greatest playwrights is an event. " TES

Edward Bond Plays:8 brings together recent work by the writer of the classic stage plays Saved, Lear, The Pope's Wedding, and Early Morning. The volume comprises five new plays and two prose essays:Two Cups: introductory essayBorn: the third play in the Colline Tetralogy (the first two of which appear in Edward Bond Plays:7); premiering at the Avignon Festival in July 2006. People: the fourth play in the Colline Tetralogy Chair: first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2000. Existence: first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2002. The Under Room: first staged by Big Brum in October 2005; 'an intricate puzzle that is compelling in both its intellectual and emotional intensity'5 stars (Guardian) Freedom and Drama: an extended disquisition on the relationship of drama to the self and society in which Bond argues that drama alone can create human meaning.

Edward Bond Plays:9 brings together recent work by the writer of the classic stage plays Saved, Lear, The Pope's Wedding, and Early Morning. The volume comprises five new plays and a comprehensive introduction by the author exploring theories of writing and theatre. Innocence is the final play in The Paris Pentad, a dramatic epic stretching from the 1940s to the end of the twenty-first century. The conflicts at the heart of civilisation have erupted into violence, and the characters in Innocence must seek refuge in each other to escape the cruelty of war. Window, Tune, Balancing Act and The Edge are plays commissioned by The Big Brum Theatre. With themes of drug use, violence, suicide, and mother-son relations, the plays focus on problems directly aimed at modern youth culture. Ideally suited to students, performers and particularly university showcases, they are short, interesting and powerful pieces. This edition also includes some of Bond's previously unpublished Theatre Poems.

This second volume of Edward Bond's notebooks covers the period from Restoration, his historic drama with songs, to Eleven Vests, his play for young people written for Big Brum Theatre-in-Education"There is a cliché - which is also false - that all creative writing is autobiographical. If I were to be asked when you write do you write about your life I would answer when I write I am living my life. "Including first drafts of plays, ideas and thoughts on characters, themes, actions and dramatic technique, this selection of notes provides a glimpse into the working mind of one of the world's most provocative playwrights. Alongside the commentaries on the plays, Bond's notes also contain stories and poems. His philosophy on theatre and art and his views on the role of the writer in society are included. Emphasis is given to Bond's critical response to political and moral issues such as Thatcherism, the monarchy, nuclear war, Britain's social classes and our definitions of good and evil.

'I am nothing. Nobody. One day I could forget what I have done. Then I am nothing with no past. My knife is to tell me who I am. It is my passport to myself.' The Chair Plays are three one-act plays that Edward Bond has combined into one continuous drama on the state of society towards the end of the present century. Faced with ecological disaster and economic chaos, governments have become authoritarian and repressive. Domestic family life struggles to survive in a world of fleeing refugees, mass suicides, ruined and deserted suburbs, and soldiers patrolling the streets. Authority decrees even the exact placing of furniture in rooms. There is a knock at the door - but it is not the secret police. It is something even more disturbing. In this broken world sheer human goodness and vision asserts itself in stubborn and radiant ways. A master dramatist creates a range of extraordinary characters, vivid situations and radical theatrical devices to stage the central problem of modern life.