Edward Bond

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward Bond, January 2001

Edward Bond (born July 18, 1934 in London ) is an English playwright .

Live and act

Bond was born a working-class child in the London suburb of Holloway. When war broke out in 1940 , the family was evacuated to Cornwall. After the air war she returned to London. Edward Bond dropped out of school at the age of sixteen and got by with odd jobs. In 1956 he wrote his first poems and plays. In 1960 he joined Keith Johnstone 's group of authors at the Royal Court Theater , which also included John Osborne , Arnold Wesker and John Arden .

After his more or less unsuccessful debut The Pope's Wedding excited Bonds second piece Saved (dt. Saved ) stir. Due to the explicit representation of violence, the drama was banned from theater censors shortly after its premiere on November 3, 1965 at the Royal Court Theater . The offense of the censors was a scene in which a baby is stoned by a gang of young people - a symbol of the brutality of society, as Bond himself says. The dismissal hardly had a negative impact on the reception of Bond's work. On the contrary: The subsequent public discussion was so heated that foreign theaters also became aware of Rescued . At the same time, the ensuing dispute over artistic freedom on the English stage, which lasted for several years, marked the beginning of the end of British theater censorship (1968).

At the end of the 1960s he was finally able to establish himself as a playwright. His plays Mourning Too Early and Narrow Way in the Far North continued to have problems with censorship, but this also meant advertising for the young author. Its first German-language premieres took place in Germany. Peter Stein staged Bond at the Münchner Kammerspiele and in Zurich .

The main themes that run through Bond's entire dramatic oeuvre are violence and cruelty, exploitation and social injustice. Although he takes up problems that can be observed not only in the current social life of England, but also in the entire western world and beyond on almost all continents, Bond also ties in with Elizabethan theater , especially with the themes of cruelty and violence .

It is therefore no coincidence that Bond provides his own version of the Lear material. At the beginning of the 1970s, his Lear adaptation as well as the play Die See received great attention. In his new version of Shakespeare's King Lear , Bond essentially adopts the plot skeleton and central elements of the symbolism and metaphor of the literary model, despite various streamlining and alienation , but radically reinterprets them as if in a travesty . In particular, Bond reinterprets the roles of Lears and Cordelias in his work. In contrast to Shakespeare's King Lear , Bond's title character is a cruel ruler who forcibly suppresses the natural needs of his subjects as well as his daughters in order to secure and strengthen his power and his empire. The symbol of his power is a great wall around his empire, which is built at his behest. In doing so, he sets a chain of bloody events in motion that lead to an unending spiral of violence and counter-violence. This also corrupts Bonds Cordelia, here the leader of a revolutionary movement, regardless of her utopia of a peaceful society. In the end, Lear understands that a humane regime can only emerge from the combination of reason and compassion. When, already blinded, out of resigned insight, he decides to set a moral example through his own actions, this remains purely symbolic: in the attempt to remove a few shovels of earth from the Great Wall that he had once built himself , he is shot. The play was successfully performed in 1971 by the Royal Court Theater and again in 1982 by the Royal Shakespeare Company ; in the translation by Christian Enzensberger (1972), Lear was also played on German stages.

In 1973 Bond continued his exploration of the work and the person of Shakespeare in Bingo . He was less interested in the biography of the famous Elizabethan author than in the general question of the social responsibility of a playwright and his possibilities of influencing a corrupt society. Bond's Shakespeare has withdrawn from London theater life and is taking his self-imposed retirement in Stratford . He is estranged from his family and friends and sits paralyzed on a garden bench for hours. Unable to act or speak, he observes the social reality around him. Against the historical background of the enclosure of the common land of Welcombe, he observes the land expropriations, the arbitrary measures of the judiciary and the persecution of the poor and feeble-minded. After all, he has to realize that his work has not led to any improvement or change in social conditions. With his own striving for ownership and his adaptation to the customs of the large landowners and real estate agents, he himself has become a follower of the privileged class who has betrayed his own artistic message. With this knowledge he ultimately chooses suicide as a consequence.

Other well-known pieces of Bond are Der Irre, Sommer, Restauration and Kriegsspiele (in three parts). In The Fool (1975), too, Bond deals with the ambivalence of artistic existence; the poet John Clare becomes the innocent victim of a for-profit society and is forced to spend the last 23 years of his life in a madhouse. In Summer (1982) and Restoration (1981), Bond works on fabrics from the 18th century and contemporary England. In these two pieces, instead of an ideological message, the complexity of basic human situations in the dramatic sequence comes to the fore. Above all, Sommer shows the problem of a course of action that is determined by the specific circumstances of the Second World War , whereby the will to survive, compassion and the fear of resisting a terror regime permeate the dramatic events.

Many of Bond's pieces gain their own peculiarity from the fact that they stage the war of all against all in different social, historical or geographical milieus . In The Woman (1978), for example, Bond provides his version of the Trojan War with the women Hecuba and Ismene as opponents of the martial world of men who wage war solely out of economic interests and whose means are murder and rape.

In addition, Bond's dramatic oeuvre generally takes up the issue of alienation between people, in which the spiritual and emotional impoverishment of the individual as well as his complete lack of reference in society is reflected. This extreme interpersonal indifference portrayed in his dramas almost always leads to a process of disintegration threatening the protagonists .

In 1967, Bond was asked by Michelangelo Antonioni to help write the script for his film Blow Up . The film became a cult film in the Swinging Sixties in London. He wrote other scripts a. a. for Tony Richardson and Nicolas Roeg as well as many radio plays for the BBC .

As a librettist , Edward Bond and the composer Hans Werner Henze wrote the texts for the operas We Come to the River (premier 1976) and Die Englische Katzen (premier 1983) as well as for the ballet Orpheus (premier 1979, choreography: William Forsythe )

Pieces

(DE = German-language premiere)

  • 1962 The Pope's Wedding ( The Wedding of the Pope , DE: 1971 Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg ; Director: Peter von Wiese )
  • 1965 Saved ( Saved , DE: 1966 Atelier-Theater am Naschmarkt Vienna; Director: Veit Relin )
  • 1968 Early Morning ( mourning too early , DE: 1969 Schauspielhaus Zürich ; director: Wilfried Minks )
  • 1968 Narrow Road to the Deep North ( Narrow lane in the deep north , DE: 1969 Munich Kammerspiele, directed by Peter Zadek )
  • 1970 Black Mass ( Black Mass , DE: 1972 Theater Bonn ; Director: Bohus Z. Rawik )
  • 1971 Passion (DE: 1972 Theater der Stadt Bonn; Director: Bohus Z. Rawik)
  • 1971 Lear ( Lear , translated by Christian Enzensberger , DE: 1972 Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt ; Director: Peter Palitzsch )
  • 1973 The Sea ( Die See , DE: 1973 Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg; Director: Dieter Giesing )
  • 1972 Bingo (DE: 1976 Theater der Stadt Bonn; Direction: Hans-Joachim Heyse)
  • 1975 The Fool ( Der Irre , DE: 1977 Theater Basel ; Director: Friedrich Beyer)
  • 1976 The White Devil ( The White Devil , DE: 1985 Darmstadt State Theater , directed by Matthias Fontheim )
  • 1976 Stone ( Stein , DE: 1979 Westfälische Kammerspiele Paderborn; director: Martin Steiner )
  • 1976 We Come to the River ( We reach the river )
  • 1976 AA America - Part I: Grandma Faust; Part II: The Swing ( AA-America - Part I: Grandma Faust; Part II: The Swing , DE: 1977 Bremer Theater Theaterlabor im Concordia; Director: Wilfried Grimpe)
  • 1977 The Bundle ( The Bundle or New Narrow Road in the Deep North , DE: 1978 Schauspielhaus Zürich; Director: Gerd Heinz )
  • 1978 The Woman ( The Woman , DE: 1977 Schauspielhaus Zürich; Director: Gerd Heinz)
  • 1979 The Worlds ( Die Welten , DE: 1987 Landestheater Tübingen ; Director: Rüdiger List )
  • 1981 Restoration ( Restoration , DE: 1987 Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden ; Director: Jan Maagaard )
  • 1982 Summer ( Sommer , DE: 1983 Münchner Kammerspiele; Director: Luc Bondy )
  • 1982 Derek
  • 1983 The English Cat ( The English Cat )
  • 1985 Human Canon ( People gun )
  • 1985 The War Plays - Part I: Red, Black and Ignorant; Part II: The Tin Can People; Part III: Great Peace ( The War Games - Part I: Red, Black and Ignorant , DE: 1988 Theater Bonn; Director: Ina-Kathrin Korff ; Part II: The Canned People , DE: 1988; Theater Coprinus Zurich; Director: Hanspeter Müller; Part III: Great Peace , DE: 1988 Theater Bonn; Director: Peter Eschberg )
  • 1989 Jackets, or The Secret Hand ( jacket or The Secret Hand )
  • 1989 September (DE: 1994 Staatstheater Hannover ; Director: Manfred Weiß)
  • 1992 In the Company of Men ( male society , DE: 1995 Schauspiel Frankfurt; director: Thomas Schulte-Michels )
  • 1993 Olly's Prison ( Olly's Prison , DE: 1994 Berliner Ensemble , directed by Peter Palitzsch)
  • 1995 At the Inland Sea
  • 1996 Tuesday ( Tuesday , DE: 1998 Theater Heilbronn ; Director: Johannes Klaus)
  • 1997 Coffee
  • 1997 Eleven Vests
  • 1998 The Crime of the 21st Century ( The crime of the twenty-first century , DE: 1999 Schauspielhaus Bochum ; director: Leander Haußmann )
  • 2000 The Children ( Die Kinder , DE: 2003 Staatstheater Cottbus , Director: Christoph Schroth )
  • 2003 The Balancing Act ( The balancing act )
  • 2005 The Under Room
  • 2006 Have I None ( Wer da?, DE: 2006 Theater Dortmund , Director: Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer )
  • 2007 The Tune

Scripts

literature

  • Leo Truchlar: Edward Bond. In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 476-492.
  • Dieter A. Berger: "The Corrupt Seer": About the Shakespearer reception of Edward Bonds . In: AAA: Works from English and American Studies , Vol. 5, No. 1 (1980), Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, Tübingen, pp. 65-78.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 39.
  2. Cf. Gert Stratmann: Edward Bond - Lear 1971 . In: Klaus-Dieter Fehse and Norbert H. Platz: The contemporary English drama . Athenaeum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1975, ISBN 3-8072-2096-8 , pp. 274-298, here especially pp. 275, 277f. and 283-287. Cf. also Werner Habicht: Edward Bond - Lear. In: Rainer Lengeler (Ed.): English Literature of the Present · 1971–1975. , Bagel Verlag Düsseldorf 1977, ISBN 3-513-02226-3 , pp. 22-31, here in particular pp. 23-26 and 30f. See also Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 40.
  3. ^ Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare-Handbuch. Time, man, work, posterity. 2nd Edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-520-38602-X , pp. 185f. (5th rev. New edition Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 ). See also Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 40.
  4. Leo Truchlar: Edward Bond. In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , p. 488f. See also Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 40 f.
  5. Peter Petersen : "Hans Werner Henze and Edward Bond - joint works." In: genre, gender, song. New research perspectives on Hans Werner Henze's work, ed. Antje Tumat / Michael Zywietz, Hannover 2019, pp. 45–53.
  6. Peter Petersen : "We come to the River - We reach the river. Hans Werner Henze's magnum opus from the 'political' years 1966 to 1976. In: Hans Werner Henze. The lectures of the international symposium at the Musicological Institute of the University of Hamburg 2001, Edited by Peter Petersen, Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 25-40.
  7. Peter Petersen : ”Cliché as a subject. Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat and his work diary. ” In: Cliché and Reality in Modern Music. Ed. Ernst Kolleritsch (= Studies on Valuation Research 28), UE, Vienna / Graz 1994, pp. 62–91.
  8. Peter Petersen : "The Orpheus Project by Hans Werner Henze and Edward Bond." In: The Orpheus Myth from Antiquity to the Present. The lectures of the interdisciplinary lecture series at the University of Hamburg 2003, Ed. Claudia Maurer Zenck (= Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft Vol. 21). Lang, Frankfurt / Main 2004, pp. 133–167.