42 Facts About Edward Bond

Edward Bond was born on 18 July 1934 and is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter.

Edward Bond is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved, the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK.

Edward Bond was born on 18 July 1934 into a lower-working-class family in Holloway, North London.

Edward Bond later explained that this performance was the first time he had been presented with traumatic experiences comparable to his own in a way he could apprehend and give meaning to.

Edward Bond then educated himself, driven by an impressive eagerness for knowledge.

Edward Bond was especially impressed by the performances of the Berliner Ensemble in the summer of 1956.

Edward Bond considers his plays written for France's Theatre National and the theatre-in-education company Big Brum to be his most important works.

Edward Bond's play Saved became one of the best known cause celebres in 20th century British theatre history.

The Lord Chamberlain sought to censor it, but Edward Bond refused to alter a word, claiming that removing this pivotal scene would alter the meaning of the play.

Edward Bond was firmly backed by Gaskill and the Royal Court although threatened with serious trouble.

Edward Bond wrote two agit-prop plays for festival performances, Black Mass to commemorate the Sharpeville Massacre and Passion for the CND Easter Festival.

The play had always been censored or presented with major cuts since its writing, and Edward Bond's was the first translation to restore Wedekind's original text, including its most controversial scenes.

Edward Bond then produced two pieces exploring the place of the artist in society.

Edward Bond remained a successful playwright in England all through the 1970s, expanding his range of writing and his collaborations.

Edward Bond's plays were requested by institutional and community theatres, for premieres and revivals, and he was commissioned to write plays both by renowned institutions and fringe activist companies.

However, Edward Bond's working relationship with the Royal Court progressively slackened, and by the mid-1970s he had found a new partner in the Royal Shakespeare Company.

However, in a 1998 review of the fifth collection of Edward Bond plays, Richard Boon called The Bundle "a genuine and shamefully-neglected masterpiece, worth the cost of purchase by itself".

In 1977, Edward Bond accepted an honorary doctorate in letters by Yale University and he began to take up students workshops in Newcastle, Durham and Birmingham, for which he wrote several plays.

Edward Bond therefore began directing his own plays and progressively he made this a condition of their first production.

In 2002, Christopher Innes criticized Summer, as well as Human Cannon and Jackets II, as examples of a problem in Edward Bond's later plays of protagonists who are either virtuous or evil, lacking complexity.

However, Edward Bond's working relationships as a director with both the National Theatre and the Royal Court were highly conflicted.

Edward Bond felt that British theatre had no understanding of his intention to revitalise modern drama and could no longer fulfil his artistic demands.

Edward Bond is simply the most difficult person I have worked with in 40 years.

Edward Bond only agreed to return to the RSC in 1996 when he directed In the Company of Men, but considered this production a failure.

Except for two plays written for the BBC in the early 1990s, Edward Bond continued writing plays in the knowledge that they would not be staged in Britain except by amateur companies.

Nevertheless, in the mid-1980s, Edward Bond's work had a new beginning with the trilogy of The War Plays.

Edward Bond found a means to do so after testing a storyline with Sicilian students in Palermo.

Edward Bond saw in this a deeply rooted force in the individual preserving an innate sense of justice that he theorized as 'Radical Innocence'.

Saunders listed Coffee as one of the later works for which Edward Bond is well known in France.

Benedict Nightingale said that most Edward Bond plays from The Worlds onward "tended to combine vivid observation with a preachy radicalism that could take disconcertingly hardline forms" but praised Coffee as much livelier works.

From 1997 to 2008, Edward Bond's plays explored in depth a gloomy vision of a future society where the potential menaces of social breakdown and bio-political control have become real and structural.

Big Brum appears to be the only professional company in England for more than two decades that Edward Bond is openly writing for and allowing to premiere his plays.

Francon continued to promote Edward Bond's work when he was head of the Theatre national de la Colline in Paris from 1997 to 2010 and, with strong support and involvement from Edward Bond, staged Coffee, The Crime of the 21st Century, Have I None, Born and Chair.

Edward Bond has been invited to take part in conferences and workshops all over Europe and America.

Notably, Edward Bond himself directed a revival of The Fool and took over the direction of There Will Be More.

The Lyric Hammersmith presented the first London production of Edward Bond's Saved for 27 years in autumn 2011 in a production by the venue's Artistic Director Sean Holmes.

Edward Bond is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.

Since the early 1970s, Edward Bond has been conspicuous as the first dramatist since George Bernard Shaw to produce long, serious prose prefaces to his plays.

Edward Bond has published two volumes from his notebooks and four volumes of letters.

Edward Bond wrote the English dialogue for Blowup, for which he received a joint Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Except for Antonioni's Blowup, Edward Bond himself considered these works strictly as potboilers and often became frustrated when further involved in cinema projects.

Selections from Edward Bond's Notebooks, edited by Ian Stuart, London, Methuen,.