Edward Bond

Plays Six includes some of the most acclaimed work of Edward Bond, one of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, who is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. The collection includes The War Plays and Choruses from After the Assasinations. In The War Plays (Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People, Great Peace): "Bond particularises daunting themes and subjects, but examines them within the context of every day life. His platform is a trilogy of plays that deal with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The first, - a quick, telling chronicle of a life destroyed before it ever got lived - puts forth Bond's notions of contemporary cultural corruption and conditioning. In play two the demoralised inheritors of a ravaged earth try to rationalise an existence predicated on death. The third play enlarges the issues by focussing on a post-apocalyptic Mother Courage for whom schizoid suffering becomes a survival technique." (Time Out). In Choruses From After The Assassinations, Bond forecasts questions fifty years into the future, in an age of escalating militarism. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

Two plays for young people In Eleven Vests, one person is involved in two events; one at school, another as a soldier in the army. Although separated by years, the incidents bear an uncanny resemblance to each other. Eleven Vests shows how the adult develops from the younger self and looks at how tragedy escalates from seemingly minor confrontations. Tuesday: a young girl sits alone in her bedroom studying when her soldier boyfriend returns unexpectedly from active service. In the action that follows she is confronted with a conflict of love and loyalty between him and her father. Edward Bond "is one of the two or three major playwrights - and arguably the only one - to emerge since the fifties" (Observer)

"A new play by one of Britain's greatest playwrights is an event...the severity and seriousness of his message is delivered with extraordinary directness" (Carole Woddis, Times Educational Supplement) On a seemingly ordinary day the extraordinary happens. As a student prepares for the first day of exams he meets someone from the past who confronts him with an impossible dilemma. It's a life or death situation. Can he use his imagination to stop the most horrific events from taking place? This play was toured to British schools during 1995 by Big Brum, the Birmingham theatre company. Notes and commentary on the production have been written by Tony Coult. Edward Bond "is one of the two or three major playwrights - and arguably the only one - to emerge since the fifties" (Observer)

One of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, Edward Bond is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. The Bundle - "A complex and marvellously written play" (The Times); Jackets - "An astonishingly powerful piece of political, polemic poetry" (Guardian); Human Cannon charts the struggle against Fascism in Spain through the stories of the village community of Estarobon; In the Company of Men, a vivid and coruscating attack on the values encapsulated by boardroom power games, was described by the RSC as "a vast meditation on the twenty-first century." Edward Bond "is one of the two or three major playwrights - and arguably the only one - to emerge since the fifties" (Observer)

A young man alone in a room. A stranger enters. Together they journey into a dark forest... Coffee centres around the death of a child and asks disturbing questions about the history of the 20th century through an examination of what constitutes "acceptable" behaviour towards children in our time. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

This volume includes the TV version and the stage adaptation "When you marry, have kids...you'll still be in that chair." An ordinary city flat. Evening. A man tries to talk to his daughter. She will not answer. The play moves through the prison of the mind, to that of the outside world in a search that leads to a tragedy. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

One of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, Edward Bond is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. "Restoration towers like a colossus ...its stylistic wit, moral complexity and theatrical force are of the kind one associates with classic drama" (Michael Billington). In settings both historical and modern, Edward Bond's plays continue to offer a wide-ranging political and moral critique of human society and human relationships. The fourth volume of his collected works contains his plays from the late seventies and early eighties. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixti This collected volume contains three plays which continue Edward Bond's exploration of themes from Shakespeare and other classical authors. Bingo puts Shakespeare himself on stage in a critical account of the writer and Stratford landowner's final days. The Fool is based on the life and madness of the 19th-century working-class poet John Clare and The Woman is set at the end of the Trojan War with Hecuba as a main character, but instead of offering a resolution its Tempest-like second half defines the nature of social conflict. All three plays deal with the origins of the tensions of the modern world. Also included is Stone, a one-act parable of oppression. Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

Edward Bond's version of Lear's story embraces myth and reality, war and politics, to reveal the violence endemic in all unjust societies. He exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this false morality as a source of the aggressive tension which must ultimately destroy that society. In a play in which blindness becomes a dramatic metaphor for insight, Bond warns that 'it is so easy to subordinate justice to power, but when this happens power takes on the dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is really changed'.

The internationally acclaimed dramatist Edward Bond endures as one of the towering figures of contemporary British theatre. His plays are read at schools and university level. "Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to have emerged from the sixti Lear - "Bond's greatest (and biggest) play ... It is even more topical now and will become more so as man's inhumanity gains subtle sophistication with the twenty-first century's approach" (The Times); The Sea - "It blends wild farce with tragedy and ends with a sliver of hope ...what makes the play fascinating is Bond's bleak poetry and social comedy" (Guardian); Narrow Road to the Deep North - "His best piece so far ... No one else could have written it" (The Times); Black Mass, written for performance at an anti-apartheid demonstration: "A Georg Grosz picture come to life ...the only possible kind of artistic imagery through which to speak of such evil" (Listener); Passion - a play for CND: "Mingles comedy and high anger with absolute sureness." (Guardian)Edward Bond is "one of our outstanding playwrights ... He is already an acknowledged classic" (Plays and Players)

"Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to emerge from the sixties ...the most savagely powerful dramatist writing today ... Bond's plays cannot be ignored" (Independent) Saved - "The most uncompromising, original and un-English English play of the sixties" (Observer); Early Morning - "A gargantuan Swiftian metaphor of universal consumption" (Observer); The Pope's Wedding - "This bizarre and unclassifiable piece is an astonishing tour de force for a first play, and if it comes to that, would be an astonishing tour de force if it were a fifty-first ... Bond is an original" (Bernard Levin, Daily Mail)