THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

the work of Edward Bond (b. 1934). Bond has always rigorously cultivated plainness in both expression and design.
His career began at the Royal Court Theatre with versions of plays by, and exercises in the manner of Brecht, and it is
to the radical, didactic German tradition that he has remained faithful. If he later proclaimed that, in contrast to
Brecht, he considered it necessary ‘to disturb an audience emotionally’ by finding ways to make what he called the
‘aggro-effect’ more complete, it has generally been to the bald agonies of Büchner and to the psychological aggression
of Wedekind that he has looked. The Pope’s Wedding (1962) and Saved (1965), the first of his own plays to be
performed, both concentrate on a Woyzeck-like inarticulacy and on an inherited lexical and emotional poverty in
English working-class life which finds a natural expression in violence. In Saved an unloved, unwanted baby is,
almost gratuitously, stoned to death by a gang of grunting youths (‘Right in the lug’ole’, ‘Get its ’ooter’, ‘An its
slasher’).
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Bond shows violence as the inescapable consequence of the brutalization of the working class in an uncaring,
stratified, industrial society. In the authorial note prefaced to the play he nevertheless speaks of Saved as
‘irresponsibly optimistic’, as a work which suggests the survival of innate goodness despite ‘upbringing and
environment’ and despite the ostensible failure of inherited patterns of religion and morality. The lapidation, he
provocatively insists, was a ‘typical English understatement’ compared to the ‘strategic’ wartime bombing of German
cities and to ‘the emotional deprivation of most of our children’. If, for writers such as Greene, Golding, Spark, and
Burgess, the violence with which Bond habitually deals is rooted in the concept of original sin, for Bond himself that
concept needed to be redefined as ‘a doctrine of natural aggression’, one determined by a manifestly unjust society. In
Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), Bingo (1974), and The Fool (1976) anger and violence are seen
not merely as the only means of self expression open to the socially deprived but also as the engine of social change,
both for good and for ill. These plays are concerned with power and the corruptions of power, and are all equally
concerned with the stance of the artist who is faced with the evidence of such corruptions. In Narrow Road, the poet,
Basho, a would-be detached idealist, is seen as indirectly responsible for the atrocities the play describes (his
responsibility becomes far more direct in the 1978 revision of the play as The Bundle). In Bingo, Shakespeare, in his
complacent bourgeois retirement, is complicit in the economic oppression of the poor, active in the emotional
oppression of the women members of his family, but silent when it comes to effective social protest. In The Fool:
Scenes of Bread and Love, John Clare, the working-class poet whose class anger is real enough, is forced into
frustrated compromise and madness because he cannot find the ideological weapons with which to fight his
oppressors. In the most emotionally challenging of Bond’s plays, Lear, he not only drastically revises the King Lear
story but also re-engages with Shakespeare’s themes of blindness, madness, and the exercise of power. There is little
room for what might conventionally or comfortingly be seen as ‘poetry’ or ‘tragedy’. Bond’s version is remarkable for
its brutally stilted language, for its extravagant and unremitting representation of violence, and for its messy, clinical
dissection of human nastiness. When Lear witnesses the autopsy performed on the body of one of his dead daughters,
he declares that he has never seen anything so beautiful: ‘If I had known this beauty and patience and care, how I
would have loved her.’ In Bond’s Lear, love, like political and moral clear-sightedness, always remains a might-havebeen.
‘May 1968 was crucial’, Howard Brenton wrote in an article published in 1975, ‘It was a great watershed and
directly afiected me ... [it] disinherited my generation in two ways. First it destroyed any remaining affection for
official culture ... it also destroyed the notions of personal freedom, anarchist political action.’ For Brenton (b. 1942)
the generation which matured in 1968, a generation ‘dreaming of a beautiful utopia’ was kicked, ‘kicked awake and
not
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dead'. The new, radical drama of the 1970s and 1980s, with which Brenton, Trevor Griffiths (b. 1935), David Hare (b.
1947), and David Edgar (b. 1948) were prominently associated, was essentially the product of the assimilated political
and cultural lessons of the Parisian événements of May 1968. For Edgar, writing in 1979, the implications of what
had happened in Paris were just as plain: ‘Revolutionary politics was seen as being much less about the organisation
of the working class at the point of production, and much more about the disruption of bourgeois ideology at the point
of consumption.’ Despite largely token attempts to take a new type of polemic drama to the factory floor, and despite
the development of small, experimental theatre-groups and workshops, much of the new dramatic energy of the Left
was specifically, but no less provocatively, addressed to a relatively élite, bourgeois audience and performed in
relatively conventional theatre buildings. In 1976, when Brenton had begun to establish himself at the National
Theatre, he proclaimed that he would rather have his plays presented to 900 people ‘who may hate what I’m saying
than to fifty of the converted’. Bourgeois ideology was indeed being challenged at its ‘point of consumption’, but,