Edward Bond, the theatrical firebrand who blew up his own career with his refusal to compromise his scorching poetic vision, died on Sunday aged 89. The death of the playwright, known for Saved, Lear and Bingo, was confirmed by the agency Casarotto Ramsay and Associates.
“I write of the rape of a corpse with a beer bottle to bring back some dignity to our theatre,” wrote Bond in a programme note to his 2016 play Dea, a retelling of Medea, which piled incest and necrophilia on to the myth’s more familiar crime of infanticide. Typical of his later career, its world premiere was not at a major institution, but at the embattled Secombe theatre, in the south London suburb of Sutton, which closed weeks later.
The son of an agricultural worker turned garage mechanic, Bond was born in north London in 1934 and claimed to have taught himself to read with his mother’s shopping catalogues. He attributed his fascination with theatre to watching his sister being sawn in half as a conjuror’s assistant at a local music hall and a class outing to see Donald Wolfit in Macbeth, shortly before he quit school at the age of 15.
He became a voracious autodidact, who incorporated his early experiences of wartime bombing and social exclusion into plays that exploded on to the London stage in the early 1960s. His break came when, after submitting two scripts to the Royal Court, he was invited to join its newly formed writers’ group. His first full play, The Pope’s Wedding, premiered there in 1962. It gave advance warning of his talent for controversy, with one critic dismissing it as “too elliptical” while another acclaimed it as an “astonishing tour de force”.
Three years later, he claimed his place in the history of 20th-century theatre with Saved, whose portrayal of alienated urban youth climaxed in a notorious scene of a baby being stoned to death in a pram. Despite a passionate defence by grandees including Laurence Olivier, the Royal Court was prosecuted and fined a token 50 guineas for defying the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to censor the play.
Undaunted, the theatre went on in 1967 to premiere another Bond shocker, the surreal Early Morning, in which Queen Victoria kills Prince Albert, rapes Florence Nightingale and is the mother of conjoined twins. The resulting standoff – with both of these first two plays banned from future production in the UK – played a key part in the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968.
During the ban, however, Saved became British theatre’s most successful export of the time, with more than 30 different productions around the world between 1966 and 1969. It established Bond as a colossus of the world stage, whose reputation would go on to become far bigger abroad than at home, particularly in France, where many of his later works were premiered.
Bond’s relationship with his Royal Court champion Bill Gaskill came to an end after 1973’s Edwardian-set comedy The Sea, with Gaskill later blaming the playwright’s determination “to follow in the footsteps of Brecht and impose a dialectical theory on his imagination”.
His on-off relationship with the Court finally broke down after a bust-up over Restoration (1981), which left him publicly squabbling with director Max Stafford-Clark for years over who was to blame – a director whose notes allegedly made no theatrical sense, or a writer allegedly unable to collaborate.
By then he had moved over to the RSC, for which his plays included Bingo, about Shakespeare as an ageing landowner who has sold out the local peasant farmers to protect his own interests. But by 1985 his relationship with it, too, had become so fractious that he walked out of his own production of his post-nuclear trilogy, The War Plays, in the middle of rehearsals. When a school in Milton Keynes later revived one of the trilogy, he sniped that their production was “way beyond the abilities of the RSC”.
Youth theatre went on to become his platform for new work in the UK, with Birmingham-based theatre-in-education company Big Brum premiering seven of his plays between 1995 and 2009. But international interest continued to flood into the Cambridgeshire home that he shared for 50 years with his German wife, Elisabeth Bond-Pablé, with whom he collaborated on translating the plays of Frank Wedekind.
He leaves more than 50 plays – a body of work that continues to blaze around the world, confronting theatre audiences with what he diagnosed as “the crisis in the human species”.
