T he atr e

Pax Bondiana

Peter Jenkins

The Woman (Olivier)

Ne doubt that this was a major theatrical „event. It was the first time that the Ptational's daunting arena had been placed at the disposal of an original work by a contemporary writer. Who more appropriate than Edward Bond, whose titanic pretension excels all others? Bond invited has with Shakespeare himself; he 'las dared to rewrite Lear in a manner more appropriate to the times and in Bingo Woman the bard to suicide. Now in The ,"°"iart he squares up to Homes in what, we "'e led to believe, will be his last essay in „,setthig straight the record — of all the "" „,d's history no less and its greatest and '°st archetypal literature — before proceeding from a theatre of questions to a theatre of answers. Bond, in the fifteen years since he leapt to ns°toriety with the stoning of the baby in °aved, has acquired many of the attributes, The least the appurtenances, of Genius. friends chief of these is inadequate (he and his ( triends think) recognition, most of all in hisO0 country. A coterie of Bondites has iernled around him, disciples who champ:,1,1, him in the face of public misrstanding and critical abuse. They are rdoubt that we stand in the presence of atness. Nor is Bond himself afraid to face see. Possibility of his own genius. He takes rrli(),Usly his social responsibilities as artist 'Z(3,n One occasion comparing himself to 0re) in prefaces, programme notes and collier occasional writings has developed a intPus of political and cultural commentary recoil which he does not, like many artists, wr. ftOnl explanations of his own art. He and poems too, mostly of a didactic kind co Which also are intended to serve as grnitnentaries on his own works. There is a ni_and manner about this output — for examl' c, the opening sentence to his preface to reZir: `I write about violence as naturally as :lie

gAusten wrote about manners' — as aspire an.d manner there is about his plays; Bond

bsepttlres to universality with a capital U. Who LLarena' es !say, to be the first to try to fill the ,.. a of the Olivier? tiond's version of the sack of Troy dis

penses first and foremost with Helen. Instead a goddess of good fortune, carved from wood, is the cause of it all. Priam, 'the bastard', is dead, Troy afflicted by the plague and the siege five years old. The stage is empty save for the prison-like walls of the

city. A wall, remember, is in Lear the symbol of injustice. On each side there is a

peace party and a war party. The Greek's 'hawks' are led by Hero& an invented character whose beauty is as stunning as the missing Helen's; the Trojan doves are led by Hecuba, widow of Priam and mother of the also dead Hector. History, according to Bond, is not made by mere individuals, nor by Greek fates: how could there be full employment in peace? Loot is a political stecessity. These are the factors which prevail.

On each side the hawks gain ascendancy but the wife of Heros, Ismene, defects and becomes a voluntary hostage, a woman's voice crying for peace. She walks the city walls broadcasting her message which is 'jammed' by the beating of Greek shields. A nice anachronistic touch this. Meanwhile, the plague-stricken plebs of Troy rise up and in another fine dramatic episode, bloddily murder the warlike son of Hecuba on the steps of the temple in which moral observances at gross odds with the social 'reality' are taking place. The gates are opened; the common soldiers' expectations of 'women, loot, drink,' are amply gratified; indeed we see through the breached wall what looks, we may presume intentionally, like the smouldering radioactive result of a nuclear strike: mutual mistrust has led to the unthinkable, the inevitable in Heros's view and the author's too, until such a time as violence is eradicated at its socioeconomic roots. And so Hecuba is blinded, Ismene walled-in to die, and Astyanax, the child, duly cast from the parapets although, as in Euripedes but most unusually in Bond, we are spared the sight of this final atrocity. The second half of the play is in total contrast. Hecuba and Ismene, miraculously escaped, are by some means washed up on the shores of an innocent and peaceful gland. The natives are given to athletics and avant garde clarinet music. Is this Bond's 'rational' society? Not quite, because

Hecuba, seeing the more without her eyes, like the de-Stalinised Lear in Lear, has

become a priestess and hence — in Bond's book — a new pillar of obscurantist authority. Ismene, who has lost not her eyes but her memory, has become the village vestal tart. Then come again The Greeks, Heros himself and old Nestor still, twelve years after the sack of Troy, a 'New Athens' built — 'a city of marble and silver, just and prosperous' — and the 'Pax Athena' established; yet still the search for the lost goddess continues. As the 'Pax Athena' is extended to the island, bringing with it not only the corruptions of the material world but the embryo also of a new world personified in a slave escaped from the athenian silver mines, so Hecuba —to cut a long story short — takes up the sword on which Heros perishes in the end most bloodily. 'Should! ask what justice is?' muses Nestor.

Bond does not answer the question. The second half of the play is slower and less successful dramatically than the first but also, and this its chief weakness, didactically far more obscure. I take The Woman to be in no way a Lysistratan parable, as some critics have done, but rather a development of Bond's preoccupation with the social nature of violence. In part one the women, excluded from the masculine power system, espouse non-violence: in part two Hecuba, her priestly authority now challenged by a world once more organised around the principle of violence, of which the renegade miner is an articulate victim, can no longer practice the virginity of non-violence.

Non-violence is no more innate in woman than violence is in men; violence is endemic only in society organised around the principle of violence, what Bond calls — with convenient imprecision — the 'irrational' society.

So it is not clear, or was not to me, from The Woman, as it is not clear from his other

work, in what degree he believes that revolutionary change in human nature itself is a necessary precondition

of the social transformation to which he is committed or in what degree he is a simpliste determinist and behaviourist.

Critical appraisal of Bond's art must rest upon its substance and not its mere forms.

He directed The Woman himself and it

moves apace, especially in the first part, and contains many fine scenes and touches; it fails theatrically, in part two especially, because it fails analytically, or dialectically. For it is not enough, in the face of Bond's pretention, to sit back and enjoy good per formances (notably Yvonne Bryceland, Nicicy Henson and Andrew Cruickshank) or dramatic stagings (the murder at the tem ple, Ismene's trial, and several more) but necessary, according to his own declared intentions, for the audience to undergo a restructuring of its experience of 'reality' itself. To fall short of so tall an order is not ignoble but we are entitled, or rather duty bound to ask, whether Bond's dramatic art is of the genius which gives blinding power to simple truths or whether, alternatively, he is possessed of some new truth or revolutionary insight into our condition. Or

is neither the case? Edward Bond, prophet or fraud? I will put the question thus high and leave it open. In the meanwhile I recommend two useful books by ardent Bondites newly published (The Plays of Edward Bond by Tony Coult, Methuen £1.95 and Edward Bond by Malcolm Hays

and Philip Roberts, Theatre Quarterly £4) and a visit to the National to see for yourself a play of vastly ambitious proportion.

Next week I shall hope to say something about the lighter joys of the new production of Love's Labour's Lost at Stratford.