Edward Bond
Another article from Mark Ravenhill in the Guardian (is that over 10 this year?) this time on Edward Bond. See here.
Good introduction to his work and influence but better is this interview between Bond and John Tusa on Radio 3. See transcript here.
…The National Theatre is “a Technicolor sewer”; the Royal Shakespeare Company “trivialises and vulgarises Shakespeare in a way that is truly barbarous”. …
Why do people have theatre?… why do people go to theatres, it’s very silly really if somebody came down from Mars and they saw people sitting there, adults watching other adults pretending to be what they were not, they would think it was pretty odd as a past time and shouldn’t people go out and get on with their lives.
But really there were two important aspects in life, one is the absolute material; chairs, aeroplanes, forests, and the relation between those things is the material necessity and the material process that you earn a living or that you can shelter yourself and perhaps be part of a community.
The other thing is the metaphor, we live metaphors and I think our culture doesn’t appreciate that at all. And a metaphor has as much reality as a table or a chair…
I feel very strongly that everybody has to live a life which is a metaphor and it’s that
that actually makes us human. It’s not our intelligence, it’s not our reason.
I put it this way, that Einstein, as a thinker is just a very superior ape. When he plays the
violin, even if he plays it badly he’s human because he’s entered into a completely
different context, completely different meaning. You couldn’t have anything call
self-consciousness without imagination. We are self-conscious beings, we know that, but normally we are self-conscious in order to listen to God or the government or some order or something like that. And the whole question about going to the theatre is to try to make the metaphor speak for us, not as an isolated product of art, somebody… I’ve just come back from Vienna and somebody there said to me, well of course art is a thing of past and we mustn’t contaminate it with the ordinary processes of life. You can imagine what I felt about that. It seemed to be absolutely the opposite. And of course there is tendency to sort of produce something that is transcendental, I loathe the word transcendental, I think it is just an excuse for some form of insanity. Everything that is in the imagination has to come from reality.
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I like that last insight….”Everything that is in the imagination has to come from reality.”
Everything we write springs from us, and we spring from our experience of reality.
And his comment about what makes us human… not intelligence… but metaphor.
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2 Responses to “Edward Bond”
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About me
I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.
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Recent Work
Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).
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Nakamitsu
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Yellow Gentlemen
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hey i am now studying your play ‘saved’ love it its briliant i totaly get what you were trying to get and i found the baby scene horrific but that makes it tarific in the reason you wrote it and didn’t wan to change a single word of it when the lord chamberlain and well done to that. i was wondering who influenced you? (this is for edward bond by the good artical)
Unfortuntately, I very much doubt Edward Bond will read your question on this blog; it’s not _that_ well read; but I believe he does reply to letters – you can try to reach him via Methuen, who publish his plays, or through Casarotto Ramsay his agents in London for SAVED you can try emailing or writing to Tom Erhradt tom@casarotto.co.uk