AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF EDWARD BOND

Edward Bond

This article is about the playwright, for the librarian see Edward Augustus Bond

Edward Bond, January 2001

Edward Bond (born July 18, 1934 in London ) is an English playwright .

Table of Contents

·         1life and work

·         2pieces

·         3scripts

·         4literature

·         5web links

·         6individual proofs

Life and work 

Bond was born as a working-class child in the London suburb of Holloway. At the outbreak of the war, the family was evacuated to Cornwall in 1940 . After the air war, she returned to London. Edward Bond left school as a sixteen-year-old and engaged in odd jobs. In 1956 he wrote his first poems and drafts. In 1960, he joined the led by Keith Johnstone group of authors at the Royal Court Theater , which included John Osborne , Arnold Wesker and John Arden .

After his more or less unsuccessful debut The Pope's Wedding Bonds second piece caught Saved (dt. Saved ) stir. Due to explicit violence, the drama was banned shortly after its premiere on November 3, 1965 in the Royal Court Theater of the theater censorship. The impact of the censors had sparked a scene in which a baby was stoned by a gang of youths - a symbol of the brutalization of society, as Bond himself says. Of course, the dismissal had hardly any negative impact on the reception of Bond's work. On the contrary, the subsequent public discussion was conducted so heated that even foreign stages were savedbecame attentive. At the same time, the ensuing several years of dispute over artistic freedom on English stages marked the beginning of the end of British theater censorship (1968).

End of the 1960s, he was finally able to assert himself as a playwright. His pieces of sadness too early and Narrow Way to the Deep North still had problems with censorship, but this also meant advertising for the young author. In Germany, his first German-language premieres took place. Peter Stein staged Bond at the Munich Kammerspiele and in Zurich.

Central issues that move through Bond's entire dramatic work are, above all, violence and cruelty, exploitation and social injustice. Although he takes up problems that can be observed not only in the current social life of England, but the entire Western world and beyond on almost every continent, Bond ties in particular with the themes of cruelty and violence to the Elizabethan theater . ^[1]

Therefore, it is no coincidence that Bond provides a very unique version of the Lear material. At the beginning of the 1970s, his study of Lear as well as the play Die See receivedmuch attention. In his new version of the Shakespearean King Lear , Bond, despite various streamlining and alienations, essentially takes over the skeleton of action as well as central elements of the symbolism and metaphor of the literary model, but radically interprets them as though in a travesty . Above all, the roles Lears and Cordelia are reinterpreted by Bond in his work. Unlike Shakespeare's King LearBond's title character is a cruel ruler who forcibly suppresses the natural needs of his subjects as well as his daughters to secure and strengthen his power and empire. Symbol of his power is a Great Wall around his kingdom, which is built at his behest. In doing so, he sets in motion a chain of bloody events that lead to an unending spiral of violence and counterviolence. This also corrupts Bond's Cordelia, here the leader of a revolutionary movement, regardless of her utopia of a peaceful society. In the end, Lear realizes that a decent regime can only come from the combination of reason and compassion. When, blinded already, he decides, out of resigned insight, to set a moral mark by his own actions, but this remains purely symbolic: In the attempt to remove some shovels earth from the Great Wall, which he had once built himself, he is shot. The piece was 1971 fromRoyal Court Theater and again successfully performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982; in the translation of Christian Enzensberger (1972) Lear was also played on German stages. ^[2]

In Bingo , Bond continued his exploration of the work and the person of Shakespeare in 1973. However, his interest here was not so much the biography of the famous Elizabethanauthor, but the general question of the social responsibility of a playwright in general and his ability to influence a corrupt society. Bond's Shakespeare has withdrawn from London theater life and spent his own retirement in Stratford . He is estranged from his family and his friends and sits for hours on a garden bench paralyzed. Unable to act and speech, he observes the social reality around him. On the historical background of the enclosureIn the commune of Welcombe, he is seizing land expropriation, the arbitrary measures of the judiciary and the persecution of the poor and imbeciles. He finally has to realize that his work has led to no improvement or change in social conditions. With his own pursuit of property and his adaptation to the habits of landowners and real estate agents, he himself has become a follower of the privileged class, who has betrayed his own artistic message. With this realization, he chooses suicide as a consequence in the end. ^[3]

Other well-known pieces of bonds are The Lunatic, Summer, Restoration and War Games (in three parts). Bond also deals with the ambivalence of artistic existence in The Fool(1975); The poet John Clare is the guiltless victim of a profit-oriented society and forced to spend the last 23 years of his life in a madhouse. In Summer (1982) and Restoration(1981) Bond works on fabrics from the 18th century and the English present. Instead of an ideological message, these two pieces focus more on the complexity of basic human situations in the dramatic process. summershows above all the problematic of a course of action which is determined by the specific circumstances of the Second World War , whereby the will to survive, compassion and the fear to resist a terror regime penetrate the dramatic action happening.

Many of the pieces of Bonds gain their own particularity by staging the war of all against everyone in different social, historical or geographical milieus . In The Woman (1978), for example, Bond provides his version of the Trojan War with the women Hecuba and Ismene as antagonists to the martial world of men, who lead the war solely out of economic interests and whose means are murder and rape.

Bond's dramatic oeuvre also takes up in general the issue of alienation between people, which reflects the spiritual and emotional misery of the individual as well as his complete lack of reference in society. This extreme interpersonal indifference, depicted in his dramas, almost always leads to a process of disintegration threatening the protagonists . ^[4]

In 1967, Michelangelo Antonioni asked Bond to work on the screenplay for his film Blow Up . The film became the cult film of the Swinging Sixties in London. He wrote more screenplays u. a. for Tony Richardson and Nicolas Roeg as well as many radio plays for the BBC .

As a librettist Edward Bond wrote together with the composer Hans Werner Henze the text templates for the operas We Come to the River (UA 1976) and The English Cat (UA 1983) and for the ballet Orpheus (UA 1979, choreography: William Forsythe ).

Pieces

(DE = German premiere)

·         1962 The Pope's Wedding ( The Marriage of Pope , DE: 1971 Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg , directed by Peter von Wiese )

·         1,965 Saved ( Saved , DE: 1966 Studio Theater on Naschmarkt Vienna; Director: Veit Relin )

·         1968 Early Morning ( Mourning too early , DE: 1969 Schauspielhaus Zürich , Director: Wilfried Minks )

·         1968 Narrow Road to the Deep North ( Narrow lane in the deep north , DE: 1969 Munich Kammerspiele, directed by Peter Zadek )

·         1970 Black Mass ( Black Mass , DE: 1972 Theater Bonn , Director: Bohus Z. Rawik )

·         1971 Passion (DE: 1972 Theater of the City of Bonn, Director: Bohus Z. Rawik)

·         1971 Lear ( Lear , translated by Christian Enzensberger , DE: 1972 Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt , director: Peter Palitzsch )

·         1973 The Sea ( The lake , DE: 1973 Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, directed by Dieter Giesing )

·         1972 Bingo (DE: 1976 Theater of the City of Bonn, director: Hans-Joachim Heyse)

·         1975 The Fool ( The madman , DE: 1977 Basel Theater , directed by Friedrich Beyer)

·         1976 The White Devil ( The White Devil , DE: 1985 Darmstadt State Theater , directed by Matthias Fontheim )

·         1976 Stone ( Stein , DE: 1979 Westphalian Kammerspiele Paderborn, director: Martin Steiner )

·         1976 We Come to the River ( We reach the river )

·         1976 AA-America - Part I: Grandma Faust; Part II: The Swing ( AA-America - Part I: Grandma Faust, Part II: The Swing , DE: 1977 Bremen Theater Theater Laboratory in Concordia, Director: Wilfried Grimpe)

·         1977 The Bundle ( The Bundle or New Narrow Path into the Deep North , DE: 1978 Schauspielhaus Zürich, Director: Gerd Heinz )

·         1978 The Woman ( The Woman , DE: 1977 Schauspielhaus Zurich, Director: Gerd Heinz)

·         1979 The Worlds ( The worlds , DE: 1987 State Theater Tübingen , directed by Rüdiger List )

·         1981 Restoration ( Restoration , DE: 1987 Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden , Director: Jan Maagaard )

·         1982 Summer ( Summer , DE: 1983 Münchner Kammerspiele, Director: Luc Bondy )

·         1982 Derek

·         1983 The English Cat ( The English Cat )

·         1985 Human Canon ( People gun )

·         1985 The War Plays - Part I: Red, Black and Ignorant; Part II: The Tin Can People; Part III: Great Peace ( The War Games - Part I: Red, Black and Ignorant , DE: 1988 Theater Bonn, Director: Ina-Kathrin Korff , Part II: The Tin Can People , DE: 1988, Theater Coprinus Zurich, Director: Hanspeter Müller; Part III: Great Peace , DE: 1988 Theater Bonn, Director: Peter Eschberg )

·         1989 Jackets, or The Secret Hand ( Jackets or The Secret Hand )

·         1989 September (DE: 1994 Staatstheater Hannover , director: Manfred Weiß)

·         1992 In the Company of Men ( male society , DE: 1995 Schauspiel Frankfurt, director: Thomas Schulte-Michels )

·         1993 Olly's Prison ( Olly's Prison , DE: 1994 Berliner Ensemble , directed by Peter Palitzsch)

·         1995 At the Inland Sea

·         1996 Tuesday ( Tuesday , DE: 1998 Theater Heilbronn , Director: Johannes Klaus)

·         1997 Coffee

·         1997 Eleven Vests

·         1998 The Crime of the 21st Century ( The Crime of the Twenty-First Century , DE: 1999 Schauspielhaus Bochum , directed by Leander Haussmann )

·         2000 The Children ( The children , DE: 2003 Cottbus State Theater , directed by Christoph Schroth )

·         2003 The Balancing Act ( The balancing act )

·         2005 The Under Room

·         2006 Have I None ( Wer da?, DE: 2006 Theater Dortmund , Director: Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer )

·         2007 The Tune

Screenplays 

·         1966 Blow Up (Original title: Blowup )

·         1969 The nun of Monza ( La monaca di Monza , together with Giampiero Bona and Eriprando Visconti)

·         1969 Michael Kohlhaas - the rebel

·         1968 Satan mixes the cards ( Laughter in the Dark , directed by Tony Richardson)

·         1971 Walkabout

·         1971 Nicholas and Alexandra (Nicholas and Alexandra)

·         1973 Russian Summer ( Days of Fury , together with Antonio Calenda and Ugo Pirro )

·         1990 Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (TV movie, directed by Don Taylor)

·         1993 Olly's Prison (TV movie, directed by Roy Battersby)

·         1993 Tuesday (TV movie, director: Edward Bond and Sharon Miller)

Literature 

·         Leo Truchlar: Edward Bond. In: Horst W. Drescher (ed.): English contemporary literature in individual representations . Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1970, p. 476-492