Dr. Browne is the author o/Playwrights' Theatre: The English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and Off Off Broadway: Art and Economics. In this essay he discusses the power of visual and aural images in Bond's play.

When Saved by Edward Bond opened on November 3, 1965, at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the audience, usually polite in the theatre, shouted abuse at the stage and had physical fights in the lobbies during the intermission and after the play. Among other things, those reactions testify to the power of theatre to make ideas concrete and emotionally gripping.

It is important to remember that reading a play can give only hints at what the power of the play in performance is like. In the theatre the images that are created by the author and brought to physical reality by the director, actors, and designers are experienced by...