Edward Bond - Collected Plays, Essays and Interviews (18 books)

* Edward Bond - Collected Plays, Essays and Interviews (18 books)

EDWARD BOND (1934 – 2024) was an English playwright, theatre director, poet, translator, dramatic theorist and screenwriter.  He was the author of some 50 plays, among them SAVED (1965), the production of which became one of the best known cause célèbres in 20th century British theatre history and was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK.  It delved into the lives of a selection of South London working class youths suppressed by a brutal economic system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift eventually into barbarous mutual violence.  The play underscored the social causes of violence and opposed them with individual freedom.  This would remain the major theme throughout Bond's work.

Other well-received works included NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH (1968), a satirical play on the British Empire; LEAR (1971), a majestic, pitiless rewriting of Shakespeare; BINGO (1973) and THE FOOL (1975), two chilling portraits of Shakespeare the rural poet John Clare, both at odds with their societies and driven respectively to suicide and madness; THE WOMAN (1978), an astounding, panoramic survey of Greek myths and misogyny; RESTORATION (1981), one of the playwright's most acute attacks on the British class system; and the WAR trilogy (1985).  Bond was broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.

Since the early 1970s, Bond has been conspicuous as the first dramatist since George Bernard Shaw to produce long, serious prose prefaces to his plays.  These contain the author's meditations on capitalism, violence, technology, post-modernism and imagination and develop a comprehensive theory on the use and means of drama.  Ten volumes of his COLLECTED PLAYS , including the prefaces, are available from the UK publisher Methuen (Bloomsbury).

In 1999 he published THE HIDDEN PLOT , a collection of writings on theatre and the meaning of drama.  He has also published two volumes from his notebooks.

Bond died at his home near Cambridge on 3 March 2024, at the age of 89.



The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

== COLLECTED PLAYS ("uniform edition") ==

* Plays: 1 –  Author's note: On Violence; Saved, Early morning; Pope's Wedding (1977)

* Plays: 2 – Introduction; Preface to Lear; Lear; The Sea; Narrow Road to The Deep North, Black Mass; Passion (1978)

* Plays: 3 – Four Pieces; Introduction to Bingo, Bingo; Introduction to The Fool; The Fool; Clare Poems; The Woman; Poems, Stories and Essays for The Woman; Author's note; Stone (1987)

* Plays: 4 – The Worlds; The Activists Papers; Restoration; Restoration Poems and Stories; Summer; Summer Poems (1992)

* Plays: 5 – Human Cannon, The Bundle; In the Company of Men; Jackets (1996)

* Plays: 6 – Choruses from After the Assassinations; War Plays; Commentary on the War Plays (1998)

* Plays: 7 – The Cap; The Crime of the Twenty-first Century; Olly's Prison; Notes on Imagination; Coffee; The Swing; Derek; Fables and Stories (2003)

* Plays: 8 – Born, People, Chair, Existence, The Under Room (2006)

* Plays: 9 – Innocence, Window, Tune, Balancing Act, The Edge (2011)

* Plays: 10 – Dea, The Testament of this Day, The Price of One, The Angry Roads, The Hungry Bowl (2018)

== OTHER EDITIONS ==

* Eleven Vests + Tuesday: Two Plays for Young People (Bloomsbury, 1997)
* The Chair Plays (Bloomsbury, 2012)

== NON-FICTION ==

* The Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre & the State (Bloomsbury, 2000) – ePUB / PDF
* The Playwright Speaks [ed. Tuaillon] (Bloomsbury, 2013) – PDF
* Selections from the Notebooks: Vol. 1, 1959-1980 (Bloomsbury, 2013)
* Selections from the Notebooks: Vol. 2, 1980-1995 (Bloomsbury, 2013)

== TRANSLATOR ==

* Plays One [Frank Wedekind] (Bloomsbury, 2000)
* Spring Awakening [Frank Wedekind] (Bloomsbury, 2012)


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