Bond Plays: 6

Book excerpt: 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)