Edward Bond's "Lear"

Author(s): Leslie Smith

Source: Comparative Drama , Spring 1979, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 65-85
Published by: Comparative Drama

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41152817

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 Edward Bond's Lear

Leslie Smith

Imagine, if you will, a mixture of the plays of Brecht and

Strindberg, Brecht's social and political purposiveness allied to
Strindberg's tormented vision of man's self-destructiveness, and
you will get some idea of the double vision that informs Edward
Bond's dramatic world. It is a world in which a sombre sense of
man's inhumanity to man co-exists with hopefulness and a strong
socio-political awareness. Bond has a great playwright's ability
to express this double vision in dramatic images, in dialogue and
action that have extraordinary force and power. In the earlier
plays of contemporary working-class life, The Pope's Wedding
and Saved, the tension between perverse, destructive energies and
constructive ones was expressed in naturalistic terms: in Saved,
the gang stoning the baby in a South London park, Len mending
the chair in his girl-friend's house. In later plays, Bond experi-
ments with surrealism and the grotesque: the tug of war between
rival armies on Beachy Head in Early Morning, the Balmoral
Picnic in Heaven in the same play, in which Queen Victoria, her
ministers and her subjects, governors and governed alike, devour
each other; and Florence Nightingale hides the head of her loved
one in her voluminous skirts. The later plays in general make
more use of fable and fantasy and are set in places and periods
remote from present day England: Japan in the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (Narrow Road to the Deep
North), Shakespeare's England (Bingo), 2l Victorian fantasy
world (Early Morning), a Britain that is a timeless mix of the
primitive and the contemporary (Lear). But there is a clear line
of development between the earlier, more naturalistic plays, and
the later ones. "I think quite often," Bond has said, "one feels
the need to see something at a bit of a distance just to see its
relationship to oneself better."l Fable and fantasy are ways of
exploring, not of escaping from, contemporary reality: "I can't
think that Early Morning is set in a limbo in a way that Saved

65

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66 Comparative Drama

isn't. In order to express reality

direct way isn't necessarily to
fifteen and it's the third of M
based on social realism very of
stories . . ." (TQ, 8). I would
Lear (1972) there is a coming t
realism of the earlier plays, an
of Early Morning and Narrow
the culmination of Bond's wor
ular interest for a modern aud
in which it stands to Shakespe
When T. S. Eliot sought to cr
between 1934 and 1958, he fel
escaping from the shadow of
queered the pitch for subseque
efforts were doomed to failur
a diet, he often rendered it ind
ing Shakespeare, he tried for
drawing room comedy that neve
no such inhibitions. His poetry
on verse: it functions through
sical images of the drama. "Wh
a series of small visual images
the whole concentration of the
somebody has to get up and
cause he is secure in his own t
in the medium of drama as E
felt free to respond to and use
world in his own plays.
It was indeed a performanc
Macbeth that gave him his fir
My education really consisted of
ganised by the school (Crouch E
took us along to a play at the ol
Town. We saw Donald Wolfit in
first time in my life - I remembe
somebody who was actually talk
knew all these people, they were t
newspapers - this in fact was m
play I got a feeling of resolution -
ards. My reactions were absolutely
could maintain these standards th
tions and produce certain results.

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 Leslie Smith 67

I could say, well, y

means to be alive. . . . And also what came across from Wolfit's
performance - and that play suited him very well - was a sense
of dignity about people. . . . And so I got from that play a sense
of human dignity - of the value of human beings. (TQ, 5-6)

Bond's subsequent career as a dramatist can be seen as stemming

from that first realisation of the power of the theatre and its
potential for enlarging our sensibilities.
But his approach to Shakespeare was never merely rever-
ential. Bond has pondered deeply the question of the artist's
relationship to society. To be an artist, a dedicated "being apart,"
is not enough; for Bond the artist is a man among men, and he
must be a functioning part of the moral structure of society. In
Narrow Road to the Deep North, the play that preceded Lear,
Bond had written a bitter Brechtian parable about the seven-
teenth-century Japanese poet, Basho, who in his personal pursuit
of wisdom and enlightenment, passes by opportunities to help
his fellow citizens and, in so doing, brings terrible suffering
upon his country. "What particularly incensed me about Basho,"
writes Bond, "was that everybody says oh, what a marvellous
poet. But I really am only talking about his actions."2 And in
the play that follows Lear, Bingo (1973), Bond audaciously
turns an equally disenchanted eye on Shakespeare in retirement
at Stratford. We know that at the time of Shakespeare's retire-
ment, the livelihood of farm-labourers and small-holders was
being threatened by the wealthier landowners, with their policy
of enclosing common land. We know further, as Bond puts it,
that "a large part of [Shakespeare's] income came from rents [or
tithes] paid on common fields at Welcombe near Stratford. Some
important landowners wanted to enclose these fields and there
was a risk that the enclosure would affect Shakespeare's rents
. . . [Shakespeare] sided with the landowners." Bond is keenly
interested in the resulting paradox, between the art and the life.
For art, he affirms, "is always sane."
It always insists on the truth, and tries to express the justice and
order that are necessary to sanity, but are usually destroyed by
society. All imagination is political. It has the urgency of pas-
sion, the force of appetite, the self -authenticity of pain or hap-
piness. . . . Shakespeare's plays show this need for sanity, and
its political expression, justice. But how did he live? His be-
haviour as a property owner made him closer to Goneril than
Lear. He supported and benefitted from the Goneril society,

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 68 Comparative Drama

with its prisons, workhouses, wh

pulpit-hysteria, and all the rest o

To some extent Bond resolves

Shakespeare expiate the mora
treated, by committing suici
playwright than his prefator
(He is in this respect comp
intended a sardonic portrait o
being and pronouncing his ow
But what in fact comes over a
the pain and bewilderment
profoundly and sees further
perhaps precisely because of
to act. Not least of the ironi
Shakespeare, the great word-
action left speechless, stunned
violence he sees around him
witnesses, and wandering, the w
Stratford landscape past a ga
hanging, Shakespeare become
among the elements, with on
panion. And when he does sp
responsibility to his society t
Every writer writes in other me
at my table, when I put on m
assistant, a gaoler's errand boy. I
the wind. If the table's empty we
leaks we send the storm. God made the elements but we inflict
them on each other.

Bond, far from distancing himself critically from Shakespeare,

seems here to identify with him.
When Bond conceived the idea of doing his own version of
King Lear, he did so with a very real sense of its disturbing
power as a play: "I can only say that Lear was standing in my
path and I had to get him out of the way. I couldn't get beyond
him to do other things that I also wanted, so I had to come to
terms with him" (TQ, 8). But he also approached the play in
a questioning and sceptical spirit directed particularly at tradi-
tional responses to it:
I very much object to the worshipping of that play by the aca-
demic theatre . . . because it is a totally dishonest experience.

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 Leslie Smith 69

"Oh, yes, you know,

rest of it." I think that at the time it would have been a com-
pletely, totally different experience to see Lear reacting in the
Tudor set up. ... Now, I think it's an invitation to be artistic-
ally lazy, to say, "Oh, how . . . sensitive we are and this marvel-
lous artistic experience we're having, understanding this play,"
and all the rest of it. ... He's a Renaissance figure and he
doesn't impinge on our society as much as he should. So that I
would like to rewrite the play to try and make it more relevant.
(G, 24)

One can develop Bond's point a little by saying that what an

audience gets from a traditional production of the play is the
sense of a man ennobled by suffering, who initially brings that
suffering upon himself. Lear's progress through the play is a
kind of purgatorial pilgrimage in which his arrogance, moral
blindness and inhumanity are stripped away, and a fundamental
humanity is left. The deaths of Cordelia and Lear are cathartic
in the extreme, arousing deep pity and fear in the audience,
the more so since they come so quickly upon the almost para-
disal awakening into new life that the old king experiences in
the brief reunion with his daughter. Goneril and Regan, in a
traditional production, are types of ultimate evil and total in-
humanity. In the world of the play that evil is finally expelled,
but at a terrible cost in human suffering. In the subdued final
passages of the play there is a sense of order in the kingdom
reasserting itself. If perhaps any lines can be quoted as central
to this traditional view, which Bond rejects, they might be the
lines of Sophoclean resignation spoken by Edgar: "Men must
endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither./ Ripe-
ness is all." But, if Bond rejects the traditional view certain
directors take of the play, I do not think Peter Brook's very
untraditional and contemporary view of the play, in his pro-
duction for the RSC, with Paul Scofield as Lear, would alto-
gether have satisfied him. For this production, the bitter despair
of Gloucester, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/
They kill us for their sport," was more the keynote. Brook,
influenced to some extent by Jan Kott's essay on Lear in Shake-
speare Our Contemporary, saw Shakespeare's play in terms of
Beckett's End Game. The scenes on Dover Cliff between the
mad Lear and the blind Gloucester seemed to echo some of the
exchanges between Hamm and Clov in Beckett's play: man's
existential despair in a world of minimal meaning. Brook refused

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 70 Comparative Drama

to distance his audience in any

to involve them totally, as with
To this end, Scofield's Lear
apart by Divine Right; instead
unpredictable and choleric old
as turbulent and bad-manner
elderly relative who would be a
hold. Goneril and Regan, in th
absolute evil: unpleasant and v
justification, given Lear's beh
kinship between the father and
ised and scaled down the situat
the awesome, ritualistic, larger-t
production can give us. One of
in Brook's production, symptom
occurred with the scene of Gl
violence of Cornwall and Reg
man, whose eyes are gouged ou
audience. At the end of the sce
on stage with the blind and bl
they express concern and sy
happened.
If she live long
And in the end, meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.
• • •

Go thou, I'll fetch s

To apply to his ble

Shakespeare place
kindly human beh
to it, through thes
conversation at t
lights up for the
grope his way off
indifferent servants - all this while some members of the audi-
ence, encouraged by the house lights, were already on their way
to the bar. Brook was most certainly not inviting our mockery
of a blind old man, or adding an extra sadistic turn of the screw
to the cruelty of the scene. What he was doing was to give us a
powerful image of our potentially dangerous indifference to vio-
lence and cruelty. He brought this home to us directly, by

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 Leslie Smith 71

bringing up the
majority of the au
ing off at once to
fate similar to th
Brook evidently
servants in the o
hook, allowing t
pressed, guilt appo
facts more direct
tanced by the his
may come betwee
lem of violence and our reaction to it in a section of his book
The Empty Space, which could almost be a comment on his own
staging of the blinding scene, and which I quote because his
views are very relevant to Bond's use of violence in the theatre.
In real life, he asserts, the shocking atrocity stories, or the photo-
graph of the napalmed child,

are the roughest of experiences - but they open the spectator's

eyes to the need for an action which in the event they somehow
sap. It is ais though the fact of experiencing a need vividly quick-
ens the need and quenches it in the same breath. What then can
be done? I know of one acid test in the theatre. And it is liter-
ally an acid test. When a performance is over, what remains?
Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and
good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument
are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly
into itself - then something in the mind burns. The event
scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell,
a picture. It is the play's central image that remains, its silho-
uette, and if the elements are highly blended, this silhouette
will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it
has to say. When years later I think of a striking theatrical
experience I find a kernel engraved in my memory: two tramps
under a tree, an old woman dragging a cart, a sergeant dancing,
three people on a sofa in hell - or occasionally a trace deeper
than any imagery. I haven't a hope of remembering the mean-
ings precisely, but from the kernel I can reconstruct a set of
meanings. Then a purpose will have been served. A few hours
could amend my thinking for life. This is almost, but not quite
impossible to achieve.4

Perhaps, of the two kinds of Lear production I have been des-

cribing, Bond would prefer Peter Brook's untraditional and
contemporary view of the play. Brook's views on the problem
of violence and how the theatre may deal with it are close to his

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 72 Comparative Drama

own. He is equally concerned to

our own age. Yet as a dramatist
of Lear, the Beckett-like exist
serves his purpose no better th
traditional Lears.
Bond's is a more radical, a more revolutionary concept of
art: "Art has to be the equivalent of hooliganism in the streets.
It has to be disruptive and questioning, also at the same time
to give a rational explanation of the circumstances in which it
is occurring" (G, 5). His Preface to Lear describes the moralised
aggression of our social and political institutions, "as if an
animal was locked in a cage - and then fed with the key. It
shakes the bars but can never get out." Yet the description of
our "diseased culture," our "institutionalised and legitimised
tyranny," is given less from a Marxist than a Blakean humanist-
anarchist viewpoint. Bond has a healthy disrespect for power-
politics, whether of the left or right: "It is so easy to subordinate
justice to power . . . when this happens power takes on the
dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is really
changed. Marx did not know about this problem, and Lenin
discovered it when it was too late." He has no wish to put for-
ward a blueprint of the future: "If your plan of the future is too
rigid you start to coerce people to fit into it. We do not need a
plan of the future. We need a method of change." If his art is
to have a function, it is to contribute "to a general consciousness
of the sort of dangers that society is now in." So, if he sometimes
prompts comparison with Brecht, it is not because he is overtly
didactic as Brecht can be, but because of a purposiveness in his
drama, an impulse towards "a method of change," and because,
like Brecht, he is too good a dramatist not to give full value to
irony, complexity, and ambiguity in his plays. What he has said
of Brecht he could have said of himself: "His naivety covers
painful knowledge."
Bond's Lear has a three-act structure, which Bond charac-
terises thus: "Act I shows a world dominated by myth. Act II
shows the clash between myth and reality, between superstitious
men and the autonomous world. Act III shows a resolution of
this in the world we prove real by dying in it." In discussing the
play I will try to suggest how the Shakespearean original func-
tions as stimulus and point of departure for Bond's contemporary
version.

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Leslie Smith 73

In Act I of Bond'
as in Shakespeare
Renaissance concep
releases powers of
focus on an old m
tionary violence,
ultimately at the
society (which cou
structure. So, say
great enterprise i
the building of a
allies in. The play
working on the w
oppression and con
both an ancient la
and the same time
the massive earth
and Fleam Dyke
departure of the R
Lear, on the tour
any contemporary
to defend the pea
prisonment freedo
I started this wall w
the field, but there
ever be free? So I b
people will live beh
governed by fools b
make you free.

The dramatic iron

twist as Lear, in th
people, shoots one
With a number o
forms of theatrica
us, in the remaind
Lear, the irrespon
Lear's madness, an
with only a "foo
(his tortured gen
spearean echoes ar
renamed Bodice an

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 74 Comparative Drama

tion to their formidable and ve

Bond, figures of black farce,
childishly indulging their cru
initiate the revolution by con
enemies, the Dukes of North a
in bitter asides to the audience of their husbands' sexual incom-
petence. "When he gets on top of me," says Fontanelle, "I'm so
angry I have to count to ten. That's long enough. Then I wait
till he's asleep and work myself off. I'm not making do with that
for long." "Virility," says Bodice, "It'd be easier to get blood
out of a stone, and far more probable. I've bribed a major on
his staff to shoot him in the battle." Bond's variation on the
blinding of Gloucester has Warrington subjected, like a puppet
figure in an evil Punch and Judy show, to every kind of mon-
strous cruelty. His tongue already cut out, he is methodically
beaten up, while Bodice calmly knits and Fontanelle jumps up
and down with perverse, inf antue glee:

Fontanelle: Christ, why did I cut his tongue out? I want to

hear him scream . . . smash his hands; . . . kill
his feet! . . . kill him inside! Make him dead!
Father, Father! I want to sit on his lungs!
Bodice (knits) : Plain, pearl, plain. She was just the same at
school.

We have to remember that Bond's purpose in Act I is to

create a world dominated by myth. These caricature figures
belong well enough to this mythical world, albeit that world has
its contemporary reference, and we can glimpse something of
twentieth-century cruelties and obscenities in the distorting mir-
ror of farce and grand guignol. The horrible fun that Bond gets
from these grotesque figures also serves some very useful dra-
matic purposes. Bond knows many in the audience will be
familiar with the Lear original. He wants in Act I to confront
directly and in caricature form the extremities of cruelty and
violence in King Lear, and, as it were, to exorcise some Shake-
spearean ghosts. In so doing he prepares the ground for his own
exploration of violence and oppression in Acts II and III. And
it is not only a matter of the King Lear original. Bond has writ-
ten: "I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote
about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and
if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who
do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them

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 Leslie Smith 75

writing about us an
important to crea
ducing the theme
deeper and more
psychologically.
where the theme
Len and Joyce stan
the Kilburn Emp
Nylons" - and ca
central image for
is of course a tech
as the medieval m
Pastorum the farc
and strengthen the
Lear, overthrown
Gravedigger's boy
(not, as in Shake
figures of crucial
Suffice here to not
fool, criticises the
and that echoes of
never far away. T
ingratitude: "Hav
"Then I'll come. N
wet or the wind c
to tread in them.
runs through Lea
sons and feed the
crawls away in ter
Rebel! Do tricks for human flesh! When the dead have eaten
they go home to their pits and sleep." And there is the presence
of a Mad Tom figure in the crazed and tortured figure of War-
rington hiding in the well. At the same time the house of the
gravedigger's boy is a real, if temporary pastoral refuge for Lear;
no thunder, lightning, and tempestuous rain show us disorder in
the universe, reflecting disorder in the body politic. Here is no
great chain of being in the Elizabethan manner. Bond's world
is a world without God or the gods. And it is at the end of Act
I, when the brief pastoral dream turns to nightmare, that Bond's
strong individual presence asserts itself and the very different
direction of his play begins to become clear. The pillaging

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 76 Comparative Drama

soldiers hunting for the escape

capture Lear, slaughter the pigs
The violence here is not in any
matter-of-fact. And Bond driv
fully by two very striking dra
effect: the off-stage squealing of
a sound which is to return, qui
of the play. The second is an ex
contrived visual effect on the de
wife's washing is on the line,
one of the sheets which folds
reads: "For a second he stands in silence with the white sheet
draped round him. Only his head is seen. It is pushed back in
shock and his eyes and mouth are open. He stands rigid. Sud-
denly a huge red stain spreads on the sheet." This is not simply
a shock effect. Although it does, undeniably, shock. It is a
strange, fantastic image of a living man turning into a ghost
before our eyes, preparing the way for the continuing presence
of the boy as a ghost accompanying Lear for much of Acts II
and III, rather as the skeleton of Arthur's Siamese twin George
is fixed to him for much of Early Morning. The red stain is a
fine image of the creeping and spreading violence consuming the
world of the play: and in the strange paradox it also suggests of
a bleeding ghost, it evokes a kind of death-in-life, a feeling of
something sinister and unhealthy which we shall increasingly
come to associate with the ghost of the gravedigger's boy.
In Act II Bond opens up his own contemporary world of
dream and nightmare, of purgatorial suffering, through which
Lear must pass to achieve sanity and understanding. In a succes-
sion of strange and haunting scenes he creates a dramatic poetry
of action, speech, and image no less powerful than some of
Shakespeare's scenes.
Thus, Lear, put on trial, refuses to recognise either his
daughter Bodice or his own reflection in a mirror that is handed
to him:

How ugly that voice is! That's not my daughter's voice. It

sounds like chains on a prison wall. And she walks like some-
thing struggling in a sack (Lear glances down briefly at the
mirror). No, that's not the king. . . . This is a little cage of
bars with an animal in it. No, no, that's not the king! Who
shut that animal in that cage? Let it out. Have you seen its face

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 Leslie Smith 11

behind the bars? T

and tears running

Bond may be rec

Richard calls for
echo is apt, for L
dramatisation he
mand of colloqui
of man as a cage
context, and is as
imagery of storm
erned as much as
prisoned within
answer to their real needs.
The trial is followed by a succession of prison scenes, quite
extraordinary in their blend of realism and fantasy, the timeless
and the contemporary, pathos and terror. In the first of these
scenes (scene 2), it is a little as if Bond had taken the speech
of Lear to Cordelia as point of departure for his own dramatic
invention:

Come, let's away to prison;

We two alone will sing like birds i'the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness.

The modern soldiers acting as prison orderlies bring Lear to his

cell. He is just another number to be ticked off the list; it's a job
they prefer to front-line duty. Then, as it might be in Macbeth
or Hamlet, "The ghost of the gravedigger's boy appears. His skin
and clothes are faded. There's old dry blood on them." Lear's
appalled sense of the world's cruelty and destructiveness
strangely now impels him to reach out towards his evil daughters.
"What I wanted Lear to do," says Bond, "was to recognise that
they were his daughters - they had been formed by his activity,
they were children of his state, and he was totally responsible
for them" (TQ, 8). The gravedigger's boy, as in some strange
folk ballad, whistles up the ghostly presences of Bodice and
Fontanelle as the children they once were. The scene of mutual
comfort and tenderness that results as Lear cradles the heads of
his daughters in his lap and strokes their hair is in no way
mawkish. It is important dramatically in a number of ways. It
shows Lear reaching out beyond his immediate anguish to a
vision of a world that might be:

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78 Comparative Drama

We won't chain ourselves to the d

school in the graveyard. The tortu
will lose their office. And we'll
without shuddering at what we've
animal will step out of its cage, an
the river, and groom itself in the
night to morning.

Here is a dramatic poetry not

tures something of the same r
Shakespeare's "We two alone w
is important too in humanisin
guignol horror of the earlier sce
in the re-enacted terror of Lear'
responsibility of environment an
ing its sons and daughters. Bon
piece of stage business for th
frantically to get into the dres
to Lear for his approval. "Take
And Lear replies: "Yes, or yo
her to him) Bodice! My poor ch
her shroud." Nothing could be
ment, distorted or misshaped b
tardy realisation of his respon
brought back to "everyday" re
world, with its visual suggestio
His Daughters, by the soldier's
old orderly coming to fetch Le
like the porter in Macbeth, lis
himself who have been consig
suffering and death:
I come in 'ere thousands a years
I don't know what I come in fo
tell what they come in for it's
'eard every crime in the book con
Don't know which was mine now.
I'd like to know. Just t'put me
science. But no-one knows now.
records is lost. 'Undreds a years
This is, if you like, Shakespear
relief; but it also evokes a ve
world, of the KGB, the midnigh
ified crime for which you are
with the ghost's frightened ple

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 Leslie Smith 79

Ghost: Let me sta

they're like an ol
but my stomach'
white. Look, my
afraid to touch me. . . .
Lear: . . . Yes, yes. Poor boy. Lie down by me. Here, I'll
hold you. We'll help each other. Cry while I sleep,
and I'll cry and watch you while you sleep. We'll take
turas. The sound of the human voice will comfort us.

There are echoes here of Shakespeare's Lear and the fool on the
heath:

Lear: Poor fool and knave. I have one part in my heart

That's sorry yet for thee
• • •

In boy, go first. Y
Nay get thee in. I'

Lear's human conc

but there is also a
nursing his own gr
world. Particularly
equivocal figure
parasite-like to the
"Let me stay with
there is already th
the ghost represe
Arthur in Early
find his true streng
camps, of revolut
leading the "freed
counter-revolution
the conclusion of
within it. A chai
with heavy gunfire
and to it the defeated Fontanelle, in her turn, is manacled.
Bond's great gift for vivid theatrical metaphor, for images that
act out the meaning of the play, is here again in evidence: one
of the central themes of the play - the vicious circle of violence
and oppression, in which governors and governed, tyrants and
victims end up chained to each other, is simply and memorably
expressed. Then, back in the prison, Bond brings the act to its
audacious climax. Katherine Worth has said that often with
Bond "it is in the most grotesque areas of the play that his

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 80 Comparative Drama

technique is seen at its most

paradox - the mystery of hum
expression. "7 The paintings o
gravings of the Disasters of W
examples in the world of art. I
the mad Lear crying out in the
Regan, see what breeds about
nature that makes these hard h
the challenge of that despairing
ally. Fontanelle is executed, and
autopsy in cool scientific fash
and Lear, tormented by his se
looks on to "see what breeds about her heart."

Lear: So much blood and bits and pieces packed in with

all that care. Where is the ... Where? . . .
Where is the beast? The blood is as still as a
lake. . . . Where? Where? . . .
4th Prisoner: What's the man asking?
Lear: She sleeps inside like a lion and a lamb and a
child. The things are so beautiful. I am aston-
ished. I have never seen anything so beautiful.
If I had known she was so beautiful . . . how I
would have loved her ... Did I make this -
and destroy it? ... I knew nothing, saw nothing,
learned nothing! Fool! Fool! Worse than I knew.
(He puts his hands into Fontanelle and brings
them out with organs and viscera. The soldiers
react awkwardly and ineffectually). Look at my
dead daughter! ... I killed her! Her blood is
on my hands! Destroyer! Murderer! And now I
must begin again. I must walk through my life,
step after step, I must walk in weariness and
bitterness, I must become a child, hungry and
stripped and shivering in blood. I must open my
eyes and see!

Harry Andrews, who played Lear in Bill GaskilPs production at

the Royal Court, was worried about whether this scene would
produce the wrong reactions in the audience; and Gaskill told
him: "The author has made a big gesture. If it doesn't work, it
doesn't work, but you have to have the courage to play it. "8 In
the event, the scene did work, and very powerfully, as Katherine
Worth testifies: "[It] could so easily have been either ludicrous
or overpoweringly offensive. But it worked. There was no laugh-
ter of the wrong kind. . . . We were too deep in feeling, too

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 Leslie Smith 81

affected by the s
Lear, then, at thi
posed in Shakespe
makes these hard
Biblical overtone
he who made the
dwell with the lam
and a little child
astonished reverenc
for the natural in
The cause is in m
a total, almost Ch
ness: " I must be
see. . . ."

Ironically, but aptly enough, it is at this moment, in the

crowning act of violence in Act II, that he is blinded. The
blinding continues the use of Shakespeare's text for Bond's own
purposes. As in Shakespeare, it is a dramatic metaphor for in-
sight. "I stumbled when I saw," says the blinded Gloucester:
that Lear is blinded immediately after the revelation he exper-
iences at the autopsy suggests how much that he has needed to
learn he has now learnt. What he will choose to do with this
wisdom will be the theme of Act III. The blinding also continues
and extends the image of power imprisoning and hurting those
who wield it. For Lear's "crown" in this scene, which "turns him
into a king again," is in fact the square, box-like device fitted
over his head to extract his eyes. It is a kind of savage, theatrical
conceit, in which Bond forces together the idea of power and
the idea of a cruel blindness, a self-imprisonment associated
with authority. And it also continues the deliberate and very
effective use of anachronisms - the mixing of contemporary and
historic detail - in the play. Bond, in a postcard to Gaskill dur-
ing the rehearsals of the production, spoke of the need to pre-
serve this mixture: "The anachronisms are for the horrible
moments in a dream when you know it's a dream but can't help
being afraid. The anachronisms must increase, and not lessen
the seriousness. . . . They are like desperate facts."lO So here
this latest scientific gadget which hygienically "decants" the eyes
into a "soothing solution of formaldehyde crystals" and sprays
the sockets with an aerosol reminds us of modern torture tech-

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 82 Comparative Drama

niques and pseudo-scientific

practised on victims of the Naz
The final act of Bond's play
from Shakespeare's. For Bon
though he is tempted toward
digger's boy and his own m
courage to resist this mood, t
his "going hence" even as his
to do. This Lear's death is a heroic death that comes about as a
result of a political act - a small and seemingly ineffectual act,
but none the less one of great symbolic importance. Pathos and
pity, overpoweringly present in Shakespeare's last act, are asso-
ciated, in Bond's last act, with the increasingly spectral and
parasitical figure of the gravedigger's boy and are seen as debil-
itating and harmful emotions. Finally, instead of a reconciliation
with Cordelia, there is a confrontation between her, as the new
head of a people's government, and the old autocratic ruler, in
which Lear decisively rejects her.
Consider first the gravedigger's boy. "I can stay with you
now you need me," murmurs the ghost insidiously when Lear
has been blinded; and his sinister presence remains with Lear
for much of Act III encouraging him to despairing and destruc-
tive acts: "Get rid of the lot of them, then we'll be safe. . . . Let
me poison the well. . . ." At the same time, the ghost is a figure
of genuine pathos, wasting away, frightened of dying a second
time, haunting the scenes of his happy early life. The beauty of
that pastoral existence that Lear briefly glimpsed has its per-
suasive appeal, and the ghost is there to remind him of it.
Through the gravedigger's boy, he has seen a vision of a golden
age which his own political activities have helped to destroy.
But, as Bond puts it, "he has also to recognise that its loss is
irrevocable . . . there are great dangers in romanticising." And
so, "it's very important for Lear that he should get rid of this
other figure; he has to disown something of himself, this instinc-
tive thing he calls the Gravedigger's boy. . . . Some things are
dead- but they die with difficulty" (TQ, 8). That difficult death
Bond accomplishes in another striking "coup de théâtre," which
eerily brings the wheel full circle, linking past to present. At
the moment Lear formulates his plan of action and rejects Cor-
delia, there is heard off-stage "the distant squealing of angry
pigs, further off than at the end of Act One, scene seven." "The

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 Leslie Smith 83

ghost stumbles
slowly die out."
makes a final, an
Lear! Hold me!"
It's far too late! .
own sake, die." A
squealing finally
is full of the ima
standing that goe
I see my life, a bla
with tears. The tear
tears in the sky. A

Cordelia, in Sha
tile reaction in B
play was to re-d
Lear. I don't wan
in Shakespeare's p
dangerous type
course, not one
Cordelia, she is a
political ones) a
recruit to death
and prepared to
preaching to the
speare's play is p
mising forthrig
Cordelia becomes most like the Lear of Act I. She insists, as
he once did, that building the wall is an essential part of the
power game; she has the same conviction that she is the saviour
of her people. And though Bond is careful to give her respectable
liberal arguments in Scene 3, as befits her more enlightened
government, those arguments, as Lear recognises, perpetuate
violence and the suppression of truth:
You sacrifice truth to destroy lies, and you sacrifice life to de-
stroy death. . . . Your Law always does more harm than crime,
and your morality is a form of violence.

This confrontation with Cordelia is for Lear the crucial turning

point. We have seen him in the early scenes of Act III as a
Tiresias-like figure, an elderly blind sage, preaching in parables
to the crowds who come to hear him. But it is a form of with-
drawal from the world that he is practising. No leadership is

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 84 Comparative Drama

offered, no action suggested:

dom of a man at the end of h
Lear knows that this phase o
over. He has a journey to go
brief ending, but one splend
gether of the play's meaning
sets to work with bare hands and a shovel to tear down the wall
that it has been his life's work to build, the wall that Cordelia
wishes to perpetuate. The wall has from the beginning imposed
its dark shadow over the action. But Bond reserves its actual
physical presence for the last scene. When it looms up, filling
the stage, it is a moment of great dramatic effect. And the
struggle of the frail old man to demolish it is the inevitable
climactic moment towards which everything in the play has been
leading. It is a heroic gesture. It is also a tragic gesture, for it
costs Lear his life. He is shot by one of the junior officers in
charge of operations. But it is not a futile gesture. Bond, in a
final stage-direction that reveals his understanding of how dra-
matic action can sometimes speak louder than words, specifies
that, as the workers on the wall move away from the body, at
their officer's command, "one of them looks back." In that look-
ing back with its suggestion that the lesson of Lear's death will
not be forgotten, lies a frail but real and important hope for the
future.

Thus Bond completes a play which, I would argue, does not

suffer by comparison with Shakespeare's great original. In the
romantic and post-romantic period, critics and writers placed
too much stress on the artist's originality. Latterly we have been
more willing to concede the artist's right to use another man's
themes and subjects as the springboard for his own invention.
A writer's originality is often best seen in his individual varia-
tion on a traditional theme. One must, of course, discriminate.
Nahum Tate, when he decided to "improve" Shakespeare for
Restoration taste by giving Lear a happy ending and arranging
a marriage between Cordelia and Edgar, merely showed how
deep his incomprehension of the original was. By contrast, Bond
sets up in his play a real, creative dialogue with the original, out
of which comes a theatrical experience of impressive power, a
Lear as seen by one of the most original and versatile dramatists
of our time.

The Polytechnic of North London

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 Leslie Smith 85

NOTES

l Edward Bond, as quoted by Roger Hudson, Catherine Itzin, and Simon Trassier,
in "Drama and the Dialectics of Violence," Theatre Quarterly, 2 (January-March
1972), 8. Hereafter, TQ.

2 Irving Wardle, "A Discussion with Edward Bond," Gambit, 5, No. 17 (1970),
9. Hereafter, G.

3 Edward Bond, Preface to Bingo (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), p. ix.

4 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Pelican, 1973), p. 152.

5 Edward Bond, "An Interview with Tony Coult," Plays and Players (December
1975), p. 13.

6 Edward Bond, Preface to Lear (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. v.
7 Katharine Worth, Revolutions in Modern British Drama (London: G. Bell,
1972), p. 183.

8 Gregory Dark, "Production Casebook, No. 5: Edward Bond's Lear at the Royal
Court," Theatre Quarterly, 2 (January-March 1972), 28.
9 Worth, Revolutions in Modern British Drama, p. 180.

io Dark, "Production Casebook, No. 5," p. 22.

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