A MEMORIAL for playwright Edward Bond took place at Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, on Sunday August 11. The aim was to create an act or action to commemorate the life of Edward Bond. 

It was organised by Sam Fairbrother and Dex of the “Commission for New and Old Art” because nothing so far had been organised to commemorate the life of one of the country’s great playwrights. 

Many of the attendees had some experience of acting or staging Bond’s work, but none of theatre’s grandees or the more recent writers inspired by Bond were present. Not that that was a surprise, as Bond’s biographer Tony Coult (one of the few who maintained a working relationship with Bond throughout his life) explained. 

Bond, a working-class child with only a basic schooling, succeeded in becoming an established playwright with his work staged in the leading theatres. However he was never that comfortable with the established theatre community. Although very certain of his own artistic project, he felt alienated from the dominant Oxbridge type of approach to theatre directing he encountered. 

He was unversed in the gentlemanly ways in which you might direct plays in mainstream theatre, but was determined to have his own plays produced and staged according to his own vision with careful and sympathetic directing. This was the source of a lot of conflict with various people in theatre. 

Intensely protective of his own work and of his authorial intentions, Bond felt his work was at risk when he saw what was for him a corrupt or perverse use of his text, which many of his working relationships didn’t survive. 

On the stage were piles of Bond’s plays. We were invited to pick up copies, browse, read and share. There was a reading from the notes prefaced to his play Stone, written for Gay SweatShop Theatre Company (1976), a fable about how to deal with injustice; a reading of his poem Spoon; a speech from Lear, and an ensemble reading of his poem Virtue.

We wish to be kind
To speak gently
To comfort the sufferers
We would walk over continents to feed the hungry
Build shelters for those made homeless by storms
Sit with the aged and talk to the bewildered
 
It is not time to sit and talk
We have not earned the right to be kind
We have not won the power to do good
In our world only the evil are clothed in virtue
And a good deed arouses suspicion
 
Then be hard!
Be unforgiving!
Do not be patient!
How else shall we find justice?

Emails were read from Bond about his wife, Elizabeth Bond, a dramatist in her own right and Bond’s close collaborator if not co-author, whose death was a shattering loss for him.

The afternoon further developed with a reading of Passion (1971), an early farce commissioned by CND. All these acts passed in the spirit of commemoration but didn’t satisfy in terms of finding an act to mark the occasion. 

Someone suggested there should be a year-long celebration of his work, with a number of theatres taking part, like there was with Pinter. But the news bump and obituaries six months ago have been followed by relative quiet, with no major retrospective in sight.

Perhaps it’s too soon, or perhaps it’s too much to expect the theatre industry to embrace its fiercest critic. Time will tell. The world seems to be ever more present in Bond’s plays, as someone observed, giving weight to the prospect of their staged return.  

By the end of the afternoon we all I think understood something more of the man and his work and emboldened by our efforts we greeted with enthusiasm the final proposal to read at a later date, Bond’s last play The Shoe Thief, which has never been published or performed.

Poem reproduced courtesy of Casarotto and the estate of Edward Bond.