To evaluate a young firebrand later in his career, as this dissertation attempts in regard to British playwright Edward Bond, is to see not the end of fireworks, but the fireworks no longer creating the same provocative results. Pursuing a career as a playwright and theorist in the theatre since the early 1960s, Bond has been the exciting new star of the Royal Court Theatre and, more recently, the predictable producer of plays displaying the same themes and strategies that once brought unsettling theatre to the audience in the decades past. The dissertation is an attempt to evaluate Bond, noting his influences, such as Beckett, Brecht, Shakespeare, and the postmodern, and charting the course of his career alongside other dramatists when it seems appropriate.
Edward Bond’s characters of Len in Saved, the Gravedigger’s Boy in Lear, Leonard in In the Company of Men, and the character in a number of other Bond plays provide a means to understand Bond’s aesthetic and political purposes. Len is a jumpy young man incapable of bravery; the Gravedigger’s Boy is the earnest young man destroyed too early by total war; Leonard is a needy, spoiled youth destroyed by big business. There is a sense in these young people that they are just starting out, inexperienced in the social situation Bond dramatizes in his work, and that they are doomed to be failures. Richard Scharine early on in Bond’s career dubbed such characters Bond Innocents. They are optimistic and inquisitive souls, identifiable in art and life.
A difficulty in the characterization occurs in how Bond utilizes the character type politically. In some cases, the character is deemed heroic by Bond when he is not. In other cases, he is the example of someone not following the right path, unnecessary for the socialist future, or he is just unnecessary for those onstage, who consider him, after he is used, a creature of insignificance. Bond’s political ardor is intense. Characters, such as innocent bystanders during war, may be eliminated with only some regret. The political cause, the ends, justifies the means. The ethical mistake of destroying innocent characters, the dissertation suggests, is what makes Bond’s theatre not the most engaging example of late 20th century political art. The man who is famous for showing situations of torture on stage becomes, through his continuing disregard for the naïve character, notorious for his misuse of the naïve and fledgling.