British playwright and author Edward Bond has created over thirty plays, including his groundbreaking Saved, a metaphorical tale of an infanticide that aroused violent controversy in his native Englan...
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Edward Bond was born of working-class parents in the North London suburb of Holloway. He attended state schools till the age of fourteen, left school without completing the eleven-plus examination to ...
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Critical Essay by Martin Esslin
What a brilliant play Saved is, how well it has stood the test of time! Bond has succeeded in making the inarticulate, in their very inability to express themselves, be...
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Critical Essay by Katharine J. Worth
[Bond] provides the most massive demonstration that a new theatre is forming round us, a theatre of acting out rather than analysis, a colloquial theatre that is a...
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Critical Essay by John Peter
[No] one would have guessed from the title or the sub-title [of Edward Bond's Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death] that its hero was William Shakespeare. This is entir...
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Critical Essay by John Lahr
A playwright's task is to stun an audience awake, to make it see what life forces it to forget. Edward Bond is one of the few English playwrights with the cunning an...
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Critical Essay by John Worthen
[Bond makes] a vital distinction between himself and those writers who use theatrical violence—or sex, for that matter—to outrage an audience and to give i...
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Critical Essay by Tony Coult
The problems Bond has had, and still has, in finding acceptance as a writer of great quality may have to do with his ease of passage from one theatre form to another. Anot...
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Critical Essay by Oliver Taplin
At the end of Edward Bond's impressive new play The Woman there is blood on the stage and the courts and temples of capitalism have begun to crumble. The Dark Ma...
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Critical Essay by Philip Roberts
The concerns of The Bundle (1978), the play written after The Woman, are in many ways similar to its predecessor, but with one vital difference. Where previously the a...
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Critical Essay by Leslie Smith
Imagine, if you will, a mixture of the plays of Brecht and Strindberg, Brecht's social and political purposiveness allied to Strindberg's tormented vision ...
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Critical Essay by Daniel R. Jones
Developing logically from the earlier Bond characters who painfully acquire knowledge about society and slowly commit themselves to action are Wang and the Ferryman i...
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Critical Essay by Mick Martin
[In] The Activists Papers (published with, and constituting, the author informs us, an introduction to his play The Worlds) [Bond] entreats: 'We mustn't tre...
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Critical Essay by Robert Cushman
['The Worlds' seems to be based on Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens.'] Mr Bond's Timon figure is an industrialist named Trench ...
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Critical Essay by Eva Figes
Edward Bond's new play [Summer: A European Play] … is set in an unnamed country which seems to be Yugoslavia; a sunny Mediterranean land with a growing touris...
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Edward Bond
Edward Bond
