Edward Bond, whose brazen work freed British drama from royal censorship, dies at 89

Edward Bond was born on July 18, 1934 in Holloway, the London borough recreated in ‘Saved’. His parents, both illiterate, had moved to this ‘stone desert’, as he called it, after his father lost his job as a farm laborer in East Anglia. Although he was evacuated to the country twice during the war, Edward was in London during the Blitz and the later rocket attacks on the city. The experience of the bombing, he said, was formative: “I was born in a society where you didn’t know if you would last a day. When I was young, I saw people running for their lives.”

Mr Bond left school – ‘secondary modern’, meaning aimed at children considered academically inferior – at the age of 15 without any qualifications. However, he showed a talent for writing and had an apotheosis that encouraged this. “For the first time I have found something beautiful, exciting and alive,” he said of a school visit to see “Macbeth.” “I met someone who spoke about my problems, the society around me. No one else had ever said anything to me about my life.

Before and after military service – “very brutal, with people publicly humiliated and degraded, a picture of society outside the military” – he worked in factories, warehouses and an insurance office, while writing poems, stories and especially plays. In 1958 he became a member of the Royal Court’s Writers Group, and in 1962 he was given a Sunday evening performance of his ‘Pope’s Wedding’, about East Anglians as bereft and humiliated as their urban counterparts in ‘Saved’.

After his reputation was built by ‘Saved’, the Royal Court staged what are still considered his most important plays: ‘Lear’, a radical update of Shakespeare; ‘The Sea’, about class differences in an Edwardian community; “Bingo,” in which John Gielgud plays a Shakespeare who commits suicide in despair over the loss of his integrity; and ‘The Fool’, in which the poet John Clare is driven mad by the contradictions of British society. In 1978, Mr. Bond directed his pacifist take on the Trojan War, “The Woman,” at the National Theater, after which the Royal Shakespeare Company staged his play “The Bundle,” about serfdom and slavery in medieval Japan.