Edward Bond - Controversial Directing Attempts and Quarrels With The Institutions

Controversial Directing Attempts and Quarrels With The Institutions

During the late 1970s, Bond felt he needed practical contact with the stage to experiment with his ideas on drama and improve his writing. He therefore began directing his own plays and progressively he made this a condition of their first production. After staging Lear in German at the Burgtheater, in Vienna in 1973, Bond directed his last four plays in London between 1978 and 1982: The Worlds and Restoration at the Royal Court and The Woman and Summer at the National Theatre. These latter two introduced the South African actress Yvonne Bryceland, whom Bond admired, considering her the ideal female interpreter.

The Woman was the first contemporary play performed in the recently opened Olivier auditorium and, though poorly reviewed, the production was acclaimed as an aesthetic success, especially for its innovative use of the huge open stage. However, Bond's working relationships as a director with both the National Theatre and the Royal Court were highly conflicted. The theatres and their actors accused him of being authoritarian and abstract in his direction and unrealistic in his production requirements, and Bond complained undiplomatically about their lack of artistic engagement and had crude rows both with some reluctant actors and theatre managers. He felt that British theatre had no understanding of his intention to revitalise modern drama and could no longer fulfil his artistic demands.

With his notoriously uncompromising attitude, Bond gained the reputation of a "difficult author", which contributed to keeping him away from the major English stages. During the mid-1980s, Peter Hall at the National Theatre repeatedly refused to allow him to direct his new play Human Cannon, written for Yvonne Bryceland and the wide stage of the Olivier. In 1985, he attempted to direct his War Plays at the RSC, accepting very bad working conditions, but left the rehearsals before the premiere after disastrous sessions, and then violently criticized the production and the theatre. He then decided not to allow his plays to be premiered in London by institutional theatres without proper working conditions. He only agreed to return to the RSC in 1996 when he directed In the Company of Men, but considered this production a failure. He nevertheless regularly accepted revivals and sometimes got involved in these productions, although remaining generally unsatisfied, and he directed workshops for RSC actors with Cicely Berry. Except for two plays written for the BBC in the early 1990s (Olly's Prison and Tuesday), Bond continued writing plays in the knowledge that they would not be staged in Britain except by amateur companies.

These conflicts are still highly controversial, and Bond and those with whom he has clashed continue to settle scores in letters, books and interviews.