Edward Bond
THE ACTIVISTS PAPERS
ON VIOLENCE
It's said violence creates violence
Violent man is chained to a wheel
His struggles to free himself turn the wheel
Day after day he's knocked off his feet and stood on his head
There are three sounds in the world
The grinding of stone
The racing of chains over the stone
And the man's groans
If this is true the state must create revolution or war
The state is the greatest user of force
If the wheel turns the state must cause violence
It may be said the state doesn't use force in violent ways
Instead it has preachers teachers and judges
So there is no nightmare
No war dance of the devil mask with the red mouth waved on a stick to frighten children
No puppet of stuffed denim with helmet and gun
To kill as if it were a child playing with clay
And so the wheel stops
Consider
The scrupulous judge weighs the law in his white hand
Politely he sends a man to prison for ten years
Or he says 'Go
Take this chance to be a good worker and live by the law
I wish you well'
The last sentence is more violent than the first
It condemns the man to give his life to the judge
Teach his child the judge has a right to send its father to prison
Respect the school that made the judge Build a wall round the judge's house to protect his loot
Hurry to work each morning to make guns for the judge to fire in the square
And be told to die in his own house or kill in his neighbour's
Or worse worse day after day to live quietly
So that the judge may give mercy that's harsher than prison
All this might be justified if in the place of violence it put order
So that the wheel stopped
It doesn't
Whatever stops man knowing himself is violent and the cause of violence
How shall a man know himself?
Let him know where he is and what he does
Consider
The man who stands in freedom on the street corner
Holds by the hand an unseen man
For twenty years this man has been mad
He is old and lies at the foot of a damp wall with his dead child in his pocket
His heart beats only to pump out his life through his wounds
He's too weak to staunch it or call for help
Who is this unseen man he holds by the hand?
Himself
If the mind had a human shape it would be this
These things were done to it by the judge who said mercy
These are the wounds of peace
The violence of freedom
More bitter than famine
Crueller than war
Deadlier than plague
It's not seen
It's hidden under the head as if that were a stone to hide truth
In such a world there is no peace
The man walks from court in freedom
The university market library broadcasting station are prisons
The street is the gallery of a prison The houses on either side are cells in a prison
We're told violence is caused by violence
The argument proves the state must create revolution or war
You priests why do you pray to the god of war for peace?
You comedians why do you dance in the temple of reason?
Violence will cause violence till men know themselves
Know where they are and what they do
Know the working of judgement and mercy
Till then the strongest prison is freedom
Few try to escape from its walls
But in it we're knocked off our feet and stood on our head
As we walk in the street
Imagination
We imagine
We couldn't think unless we imagined
We couldn't work unless we imagined
We couldn't make a machine unless we imagined
We couldn't make a poem unless we imagined
We can't know everything
There's no time to see round corners
We need imagination to understand what's real
We need imagination to live in history
If we didn't imagine we'd be as slow and cumbersome as wooden puppets
We'd be in eons
We may imagine the real to be false
With a new strength a new weakness
Imagination helps us to learn
It makes thinking more skilful
Imagination is iron law yet free to be false
We imagine we're wise
We imagine blackmen or whitemen are devils
Trees and stones can't imagine
They're in the world of iron law
It's also in iron law that to live in history we must imagine
In imagination there's freedom and slavery
Imagination to men is as the pole star to the sailor or the axe to the tree
On us lie the burdens of morals and choice
These like roots are a way to be in the world
Without them we'd be in eons
Roots and leaves are the tree's way to be in the world
By these means it makes part of the world into itself
All our abilities are means in this way
They're iron law
We're free yet in iron law
We imagine and think
These are means by which we're part of the world and make part of the world us
They're the way we're in the world
History is the way we're in the world
Society is the way we're in history
Society organizes us into a way to be in the world
So we eat drink and build
This is a means as roots are means
Society organizes us to live together and make tools
We prosper and win great power and learning
Those who can be taught can be told
We're told what we are
But we are what we do because that's the means by which we are
We're told but we also learn by ourself Society tells us what we are in society
The branch doesn't tell the leaf to be part of the tree
We're not as safe as the tree from the axe
We're born in ignorance
We're born to question
That's why we're men
When the tree first grows it's already a tree
We're not men when we start to live
We don't know what we are till we learn
We learn to be men
To be human or inhuman
The tree can't learn to be stone
We must be born in ignorance or our minds would be as rigid as stone
We change the world As the world changes our mind changes
From: Edward Bond. Plays Four. London: Methuen, 1992.
THE WAR PLAYS;
COMMENTARY ON THE WAR PLAYS
Society needs drama (even in debased commercial forms) because in it it seeks the human
image. It must do this even when theatre degrades the human image. Great national
institutions - national theatres, national galleries and so on - promote culture but also control
and repress it. They make the whole of society a ghetto. Theatre is comparatively free of
technology. A few people in a room can make a play. This is a strength because often it frees it
from political control, in both its police and commerical forms. But it is also a weakness. Our
times are too fast and chaotic for the stages in attics and cellars, on their own, to be able to
study and recreate the human image. We also need to show how the whole of modern
technology belongs to our creative psyche. But there is a conflict between financial resources
and creative forces. In unjust society creative forces can no longer come from the state,
because it no longer represents a progressive class that flourishes on human reason: it
represents only an exploiting class and its ability to exploit. Now the creative forces of art
come from the street. There is no more folk art, it has become the kitsch of commercialism.
But street art is creative. We should not romanticize the street - as much garbage and cruelty
are found there as in the cultural institutions. But street skills and disciplines are as astringent
and liberating as those of academies. And more important, it is in the street - though we may
wish it did not have to be so - that radical innocence is most potent. Authority in unjust
society must lie, the street may lie but need not. Academies and national theatres cannot
develop the skills of art because they no longer need art. The street needs art.
We think art has its source in truth, but its source is in lies. A child asks what, why, how - the
questions of the great philosophers. It asks these questions because its brain is over-capacious
and holistic. A child asks the profoundest philosophical questions, but it asks them about its
room because that is its world. And as it grows it seeks a reason even for the stars. In that they
have meaning, the questions - how, what and why - are truthful, but the answers are
confusions and lies. The child gives the first answers itself. They are imagistic - the images
'see' its feelings. This early language expresses more than it describes, but it is intellectual and
discriminates and analyses; even the first images are symbolic because they point to the
nothingness that surrounds them. Lear tells his child 'nothing will come of nothing', but
everything comes of nothing. This is the infant's first encounter with truth, and from it comes
the dependance on art. Later it will be taught answers - but these will be lies or full of error.
Primitive societies mix error and truth in order to exist; they dig wells but worship the rain
God. Authority uses phenomena still beyond its understanding to coerce and stimulate society
- it surrounds it in mystery. The sacred is a way of keeping the world in thrall. The priests'
function is to be so possessed by illusions that they become real - that is, people act on them and when this is not possible, to lie. Dostoievsky's inquisitors lie to everyone except God,
whom they offend with the truth.
A society that uses a hydraulics technology may still demand belief in the rain God and found
its institutions on his existence. The society that does this is constantly torn apart. To preserve
the 'great social truth' - what society believes in order to maintain its structure - the 'truths of
society' - the knowledge it needs to exist in the world - are constantly denied. So the 'great
social truth' is a lie. Society equates the world with its culture just as the child equates the
world with its room. The child cannot escape from the life of its room and society cannot
escape from its rain God. As the child grows it puts the world into its room, not the other way
round - its mind can never leave the room because that is its psyche's foundation. As it grows
up into its parents' world they answer its truthful questions with the 'great social truth' - the
mixture of confusions and lies. A child cannot understand the science of hydraulics or the
shibboleths of economics but it can understand and live with the illusions of fairy tales and
rain Gods. Children are lied to so that they may learn to honour the truth.
A child interprets its later knowledge in terms of its earlier knowledge - of the assurance or
vertigo and suspicion it gave it. It is not that it doubts new facts, but that all its knowledge
must build on its first, early 'symbolic against nothingness' - which is not merely expressive
but discriminatory and analytic. New knowledge cannot transcend the earlier mind, the mind
that is created in radical innocence. Children's questions can never be answered. They could
not be answered even in a life after death - even God could not answer them. God is the last
person qualified to know the meaning of life, he could only make excuses. Why justify X
when you need not have created X? Why give an answer when there need have been no
question? Even if some creator could ordain the whole sequence of evolution he could not
give it meaning. Meaning comes from experience within evolution. Even if evolution had a
preconceived, determined end, this could still only be its 'meaning' for a worm - not for a
cognitive, sensate being. Even if such a being conceived the same determined end, it would
do so within its limitations - it would then be the limited creature's end, not the Pantocrators.
God could not even create his own meaning. He could exist only because we knew him. And
to love is to be in need. So the gap between Gods and human beings cannot be closed.
Christianity tries to close it by claiming that God became every man and every woman, but
clearly this is not so. To be of use religion must always claim too much - and when
circumstances change, the too much inevitably becomes grotesquely too little.
The profoundest religion is nirvana, but because it asks the unanswerable question most
honestly it is also the most fatuous. Why should nothingness hide itself in the veil of illusion?
The religion of nirvana, like all religions, depends on illusions; it cannot tell why something
should come of nothing, and certainly not why Himmler should preach the sermon on the
mount. The philosophical riddle is that there should be any questions. God would have to ask
the child the questions, and one would be as ignorant as the other. So the child must accept
responsibility for the world. What else can it do? When it asks what and why it cannot
withdraw from the world to the side like God. Children cry because they are philosophers.
Children ask what and why but must learn to ask how much, how often and when? As the first
questions cannot be silenced but persist, they are given the answers to the second questions.
And so radical innocence creates tension and, when it is confronted, the paradox. It is said that
the child is father to the man. But it is the man's duty to murder the child. He does this by his
answers and - because he also was a child - his anger. We cannot look into a human face that
is not the face of a murderer and his victim - and both these things many times.
Art is a language without grammar, because the child Christianity was shaken - so the new
force must be the Devil. The Devil is to renaissance theatre what the Gods are to Greek
theatre. As the fundamental social relations were changing, all the themes of the new drama
became available together, at once, to the first of the new dramatists, Marlowe: money (The
Jew of Malta}; expansion and imperialism (Tamburlaine); and energy, industry and science
(Dr Faustus). Dr Faustus was the most important because it created the new industrial
theology.
Technology needed a new Promethean psychology, but the owners of society needed to curb
it. Faust makes a contract with the Devil that Christ had no need to make, because it offered
him what in the Christian drama was already his: this world. This world was contained in the
next, and so God could rule without the compromises of politics and the Devil. Capitalism
cannot, it needs the Devil: the Devil frees people from God but puts them in chains.
Like the Greeks (and for the same reason) Shakespeare rewrote stories from the past. He did
not rewrite Dr Faustus, though he must have wanted to. All his plays are versions of Dr
Faustus, it is the unwritten subtitle of all of them. But Marlowe had said about Dr Faustus all
that the times needed to be said - or all that the form of ownership, and its religion and
politics, allowed to be said or could even imagine. Shakespeare could have only embellished
the play with aesthetics and he was too analytical a writer to be content with that. But
someone had to write Dr Faustus before Hamlet could meet his ghost.
Dr Faustus combines tragedy and comedy. A version of Dr Faustus without comedy ignores
the social process it is meant to be about. The Satanic force is dynamic, destructive,
irreverent, industrial and rides over corpses. The Devil is even part animal. He makes the
grotesque of primitive religion useful once more (the theatre of the absurd will trivialize it
again). Industrial, Satanic energy subverts judgement and enslaves people but provokes a
seething discontent and confused understanding which are our hope of freedom. Renaissance
society could not have been created and administered without the Devil. The machines were
laughing at our stupidities.
Shakespeare needed ghosts and witches. His patron King James wrote a book confirming their
existence. It is a common device of ruling class ideology - and also a symptom of hysteria - to
appropriate folktales and turn them into journalism. And so the witch-hunt ravaged Europe.
Witches were scotched out of copses, heaths, rural byways, village hovels - but really the
tittle-tattlers and theologians were speaking the language of the new machines: witches were
made in factories. Greek democracy sought order and needed Gods, capitalist society seeks
profit and needs the Devil.
Later when capitalism was consolidated, the enlightenment threw the Devil out of the front
door and romanticism brought him in at the back. Milton and Blake made Satan a hero, but in
romanticism he is tainted with bad habits. A malaise lingers in the romantic soul like smoke
over cities. The smoke of witches' fires blows away, but working class stench must be lived
with. Romanticism desocialized Satanic energy and made it hedonistic and anarchic - this also
relieved the tedium of bourgeois respectability, which was another consequence of capitalist
consolidation. As the nouveaux riches went up in the world the Devil even became an
aristocrat, and mill owners would have happily married their daughters to him. Well, he was a
prince. Still later, romanticism became a bridge between the witch-hunt and American
psychoanalysis (a castrated McCarthyism). Science still retains much Satanic theology sociobiology puts Satan in our genes and science fiction puts him in outer space. Nuclear
weapons are a recent form of the witch-hunt - they are used to threaten Empires of Darkness.
Capitalism could not survive without the Devil and his works.
As machines became more complex they took over more of society. A new social discipline
was needed to allow machines to work in peace. The social violence of capitalism was
interiorized. The effects are seen in nineteenth-century theatre: psychology determines fate
and imprisons philosophy in character. The theatre held, as emphatically as ever, that our lives
are not in our control; but in place of Gods and Devils it made the unconscious our fate. When
the Greeks submitted to their Gods they discovered their humanity, but we can only submit to
ourselves, and create values and understand the world in the image of our own anger and
triviality. In this submission we do not gain tragic status but are merely criminals with the
wounded pride of victims. God is Father, Satan is Son and psychology is Holy Ghost.
Ibsen's Master Builder falls like Satan, but not to escape from the theological tomb of heaven
- he falls to his death. Drama was at a turning point. Soon dramatists would clutch at
mysticism like naked men clutching at shrouds. Ibsen was a revolutionary-conservative. He
increasingly turned social relations (using the tensions that disturbed social order) into
mysticism or the frankly occult. The Master Builder is tempted not by Satan but by the trolls
he hears deep in the mountain. The rock will not become a holy door as it did for Oedipus and
Christ. And it is not Antigone's stone room. She shut out the Gods and hung alone - and there
were only the stone walls, stone roof, stone floor, the rope and her body which turned to rags
and bones and fell to a little heap on the ground under the hook beside the untouched food in a
bowl which might have been a tin can. No one entered her room for two thousand years till
the Devil came and led her out as a witch.
'Theatre has only one subject: justice.' (interview with British playwright Edward Bond)
A rare audience with Edward Bond
In 1965 Edward Bond's "Saved" was banned by the Lord Chamberlain. In the play's most
controversial scene a baby is stoned to death in its pram: Bond's drastic expression of Britain's
moral depravity. The ensuing outcry led to the abolition of theatre censorship in Britain. Since
then Bond has continued to produce uncompromisingly fierce portraits of a society corrupted
by capitalism. He has written screenplays, lyrical dramas and even comedies, but his finest
work is resolutely political. Always socialist, it verges on the apocalyptic in "Lear" and "The
War Plays", about power and militarism after a nuclear holocaust.
Bond's work is consistently performed across Europe, but it is years since he premiered a play
in this country. He scarcely ever gives interviews, but agreed to talk to the NS if our questions
were voiced by his colleague, the director Michael Bogdanov. They spoke during rehearsals
for "In the Company of Men", Bond's savage drama about business ethics which opens at the
Barbican on October 22, directed by Bond.
Michael Bogdanov: Edward, you've been away from our theatre for a long time. What do you
think has changed, in terms of censorship, say, or what is and isn't acceptable on the British
stage?
Edward Bond: What you're asking is really about the condition of human beings at this
moment. If you go back to the end of last century, everybody was looking for prognostications
about what would happen in the next 100 years. They thought there would be invasions from
outer space, a world war which no one would survive. But nobody imagined Auschwitz,
nobody imagined Hiroshima. It's very interesting to try to learn from their misforecast what
the disasters of the next century will be, why they got it wrong, although they sensed
something untoward was going to happen. Our problem is to understand just what's happened
to us this century, to understand how we came to be as we are now. It seems to me that we are
profoundly ignorant of ourselves. When all those children were killed at Dunblane, the Prime
Minister said that this was something that could have no explanation. I believe there is a clue
here to our contemporary situation.
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely,
we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed. The theatre, our theatre, comes
from the Greeks. They created a democracy: they needed a theatre; the two go hand in hand.
I'm interested that if you turn on television today, more and more you get the subjects of
Greek drama: the assassination, the struggle between men of power, even incest. These are the
subjects of the soaps themselves. Censorship now allows all this.
But compare what the Greeks did with these subjects with what we do now. The Greeks tried
to understand their situation. They accepted that there were limits to their knowledge; that's
what Socrates says: know what you don't know. But they examined their situation. They
actually brought the Gods on stage to question them about these things, and, extraordinarily,
in the Oresteia they even made a God vote. But that kind of questioning theatre vanished, and
its disappearance has something to do with religion.
What happened was Christianity. Christianity is a Greek play that' s become real. And slowly
you get this huge drama, no longer on stage, which has been western civilisation.
Occasionally theatre broke out in big eruptions, as in Jacobean society, but mainly it was an
enormous static drama that we were all involved in, we all lived. This doesn' t work any more.
And that's our situation.
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once
done. And it was less of a problem, because you could put goodness up in heaven. If you
behaved in a certain way, goodness was up there. People could be good collectively. You were
a member of the church and it was a common thing: you shared goodness . . .
MB: At what point do you think this started to break down? When did theatre disappear from
society as a means of expression?
EB: It hasn't disappeared - there's more drama now than ever before. But now it's just a
commodity, and it serves a different function. It's served a different function since the middle
of the last century although there was a recrudescence around the time of Ibsen because
whenever society begins to question itself, theatre suddenly gets interesting.
What happened was this. In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then
goodness became privatised. It's a purely individual relationship you have with society now.
Goodness used to have an economic as well as a moral and psychological function. If you
wanted to change your society you did it because you wanted more food, better shelter, better
protection. And God had to be on your side, so you had to be a good person. Working for food
was always a search for some practical good in this world.
Now here's a strange thing. We are much better clothed than we've ever been before, better
fed and better housed - read Engels' reports from the middle of last century, there's absolutely
no doubt about it. Why, therefore, are we not better people? That's the enigma and that's what
John Major does not understand. It's because if we've got all these goodies, what is the point
of collectively organising and searching for something called good?
All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a
community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And
competition is antagonism.
MB: This, of course, has been the subject of your work since the very beginning. You've
always looked at a very clear concept of goodness measured directly against the way we're
governed: that Brechtian idea that every person has their price. Whether it's 30 guineas in
Restoration, or the [pounds]50,000 at the centre of In the Company of Men. But how do you
propose we turn round this acquisitive society, divert it from a headlong descent into
computerised madness?
EB: You mention money. Suppose you have a pound of tea in a poor person' s house and you
have a pound of tea in a rich person's house. Which is the most valuable pound of tea? You
might think it would be the one in the poor person's house because they would use it more and
value it more. But much the most valuable is the one in the rich man' s house. As the gap
between rich and poor opens you get two currencies. The more money the rich person has, the
more he devalues the money that the poor person has. If you have a pound of tea in one house,
all it signifies is a drink. If you have a pound of tea in the other, it signifies access to a yacht,
to culture, to society, to power. The money in the poor person's pocket: it's not that it's actually
less, it is simply worth less socially than in the rich person's pocket. What we're seeing is a
radical, psychological impoverishment of people. We really ought to have pound notes for the
rich which are beautifully coloured things, and pound notes for the poor which are like rags.
The culture is as divisive as that. We've got to understand this Brechtian thing about money
differently. Brecht said give them the food and you'll get the morality. He's wrong. The
objective of western democracy now is to de-democratise people. It is a political corruption of
human society, and I think our theatre is part of that corruption,
MB: But what kind of government are you proposing to replace this? What you are describing
has been going on for a long time.
EB: You're not quite taking in the new situation. I'm talking about a cultural decline. For
instance, the function of religion now is not to have a God, it's to have a Devil. We need a
Devil to explain the inexplicable. That's what the religious revival is all about. When a
fundamentalist says: "I've found Jesus," what he's actually found is a label called "Devil"
which he can pin on you if you don' t agree with him.
MB: Why do you say theatre is corrupted, too?
EB: Any time there's a dramatist on the radio they always ask them: shouldn't your drama be
entertaining? Well, what is drama ? It is something you put into your head to renew your
mind, as food will nourish your body. What should you put into your mind to feed it? Think of
an entertainment like Miss Marple on television. What is that really about? Miss Marple is a
granny who is engaged in sending people to the scaffold. She shades directly into those fascist
policemen in modern American films. Now, the Greeks would have questioned the justice, the
motives and activities of such people, would have drawn the Gods into the drama. What we
do is consult the law books and turn it all into a legal drama. If a crime is committed in
contemporary drama, it's all about court proceedings, Q and A. Actually, if a murder is
committed, it is a social question. I have been offended, even if I don't know the victim, my
society has been offended. This should be profoundly disturbing. But the criminal-anddetective plot of modern drama asks only "whodunnit?" The crime is supposedly private.
Our theatre takes the great questions and trivialises them. It has to change completely. Greek
drama may offer no answers to the problems of our existence, but it places life in a larger
frame so that people can understand it. Shakespeare has no answers for us at all. We talk the
most terrible nonsense about him seeing every side of a situation. Actually, Shakespeare is a
fanatic, a total fanatic. He marches people through his version of history and then says:
"That's it! That's the end. Enter Fortinbras." Lear suffers; he dies; the situation is restored. But
while Shakespeare always says in the end: "My view is right," he is a profound dramatist
because he deeply imagines what it's like to be in all those situations.
MB: You have the same theory, in a sense, operating in your work as Shakespeare: that blood
isn't thicker than water. You write about capitalism, he writes about the crown; brother betrays
brother, mother betrays son, father kills cousin or son, all in the name of divine right. The
same principle is operating where money is concerned in your new play. The business
partners, even those who are related, betray each other to get a bigger financial empire; the
humanitarian side of the relationship disappears. You have said that capitalism is a human
perversity to which we have become inured. Is your view really this bleak?
EB: There seems to be no alternative idea in this country of what, collectively, our society
could be. You have to remember that Mrs Thatcher was kept in power for a long time by
democratic votes.
MB: Not by democratic votes, Edward, by undemocratic votes. A majority of the population
voted against Thatcher in three elections and in one election it was three out five people
voting against her, but because of our electoral system she was kept in power by a minority
vote.
EB: That might be strictly speaking true, but it's not dramatically true. It doesn't reflect the
way the social antagonisms in society express themselves. If, for instance, there hadn't been a
holding party in the middle, what would have happened to those votes? What is just
frightening is that dramatists did not speak adequately about that situation so that people
would see more clearly what was happening to them.
MB: What kind of political theatre are you suggesting?
EB: I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that
would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.
MB: I feel ambivalent about that. I did once think you could change the world through
theatre. I no longer believe that. The most you can do is reflect a corner of your consciousness
and effect change via a few people who might have enough power to exert some kind of
change. But I do believe that it is vital that artists don't become politically reticent.
EB: I disagree with your fundamental premise. You say theatre cannot change the world. I
think there is no world without theatre. The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and
our society is absolutely saturated with drama. Even just the Lottery, with its sudden crock of
35 gold at the end of the rainbow.
MB: But you still haven't answered my question: what is the way forward for society? Surely
it's through education, the opening of the imagination and potential of each child.
EB: The people who ran Auschwitz were educated.
MB: So do you think theatre can change the world?
EB: That's like asking whether breathing is good for you, as far as I'm concerned. You've said
that you cannot make drama popular. I absolutely disbelieve this. The audiences who went to
Greek theatre were ordinary people. The people who went to Shakespeare, to Jacobean
theatre, were ordinary people.
I wrote a play set in the Trojan war, because that war raised some interesting questions. The
play was performed by a group of amateur actors in Manchester who decided they would take
the rehearsals to a hostel for battered women. When the matron heard what the play was
about, she said: "You can't put that on here, these women have black eyes, they are living in
fear." Well, the actors began rehearsing and suddenly they heard one of the women say:
"She'd never talk to her mother like that," and the women took the rehearsal over.
I wrote a play called Coffee, certainly the most difficult and demanding play I've ever written.
It was sent to the National Theatre; they returned it. It was sent to the RSC; they said they
couldn't get into it. It's being done by ex-miners in the Rhondda Valley. It'll have its first
production in Paris. Now, I think that it is our own fault if we do not present people with a
difficult theatre. We try to make an easy theatre, we try to condescend to people, we do not
make demands upon them. People have real and urgent problems, problems they cannot
necessarily escape. It is the job of the drama to deal with those problems.
MB: But Edward, you're not making the right connections. I have just made a film of The
Tempestusing the residents of Tiger Bay down in Cardiff, the oldest multicultural society in
Britain, a mixture of Yemeni, Somali, Afro-Caribbean, Estonian, Latvian, all huddled together
in this housing estate. The talent, enthusiasm and energy released merely by somebody
suggesting these people take the text into their own hands and say something about the
developers encroaching on their estate: that's what I mean by education. The miners in the
Rhondda, my project, community plays: they are wonderful, but they are crumbs to a
population that is starving and needs much more to nurture them.
EB: I agree that this country doesn't allow for that. Fifteen years ago I walked out of a
production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time. I thought
working in English theatre was a total waste of time and I would just go off and write my
plays. They started putting them on abroad, so there must be some interest in what I'm
writing. We need to write The Tempests of our own age: this means respecting audiences as
extraordinarily receptive.
MB: You say you are an optimist. Where is the optimism in the new play?
EB: I don't know what the play is about yet. I may begin to understand by watching the actors
at work. What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion. At the
end, some people will go out worse people, some people better, that's all I know. But I do
know that both sets of people will have to redefine themselves; I will have put a certain
amount of pressure upon them. They may say: I was bored, I didn't really listen, I don't ever
believe that. But what the hell does my opinion matter? It's insulting to ask a dramatist what
his view of his play is. I have no opinion. All I can tell is the truth of a situation. If it then
matters to you, you will have to seek a solution. To ask the dramatist to provide an answer is
like asking the sea to invent a fish. All you can do is present a sea: if somebody wants to swim
in it, there it is.
When the Gods came down at the end of the Greek plays, everybody says they provided a
solution: deus ex machina. They never did. And the Greeks knew it. They just said, well, we'll
have to accept that this is as far as we can go. By accepting that, by understanding the
situation, we make ourselves human. If people become responsible for their humanity there
may not be an Auschwitz.
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive. We are still living in the
aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history. We may seem competent, but by
the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins. People will have new pains, new
happiness. But we have to tell them what it is like here so that they will recognise us,
recognise their past, and this will help them to be themselves. All I can do is instil this with
urgency into my drama. In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice. What I have to
do is to make people realise that they need justice to be human and that justice is something
collective. We can understand ourselves if we try. It is a painful and difficult process but it is
the imperative of theatre.
Bogdanov, Michael, 'Theatre has only one subject: justice.' (interview with British playwright
Edward Bond). Vol. 125, New Statesman (1996), 10-18-1996, pp 34(3).
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