Edward Bond Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Edward Bond

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 England and abroad when it was first produced in 1965. Saved was banned in England for its violence, but the ensuing furor ultimately led to the abolition of censorship in that country. Dubbed everything from a Marxist playwright to a realist and lyric dramatist, Bond writes plays intended to make people think rather than simply be entertained. "Bond does not write about violence," observed Simon Trussler in British Writers. Instead, Trussler contended, "he writes about the effects upon the human spirit of a violent environment." Bond's work includes drama, comedies, screenplays, poetry, and criticism, but his focus is on the political use of the theater. "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," he told director Michael Bogdanov in an interview published in New Statesman.

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