Author Topic: Bond interviewed by John Tusa  (Read 8954 times)

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Online Iain Fisher

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Bond interviewed by John Tusa
« Reply #1 on: May 23, 2008, 04:35:53 PM »
BBC Radio 3 have an online link to an interview with Edward Bond.  Some interesting bits but it does get a bit intense on strange topics.

The interview and transcript are here:
www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/bond_transcript.shtml

From the introduction:

- Why haven't we seen more of them in London, on the stages of the national theatres, on the screens of BBC Television? And here the problems - or rather the interesting bits - begin. Bond's plays are performed - in France and Germany and elsewhere on the continent. But he refuses to have them played by our national companies of whom he is very critical. The National Theatre is "a Technicolor sewer"; the Royal Shakespeare Company "trivialises and vulgarises Shakespeare in a way that is truly barbarous".


The interview itself becomes heated

-But it's what I said earlier about, you put these things very strongly, very
provocatively, but my God you overstate the case don't you?
- No.
- Yes, you do, I mean the idea that technology can be dismissed as being 100% bad...
- I didn't say that.
- Yes you did because you said that all it was, was a way of supporting an otherwise
dead society, dead...
- That's the way it works for us, I mean if we were human beings we would be able to
use our hospitals, we would be able to use all the science that we've got, not in order to gas people and not in order to drop bombs on Hiroshima .
- Yes, but you see you don't admit that we do other things with technology?
- Yes I do.
- You don't.
- I'm sorry, I do, look I'm only talking about the collective, I'm talking from the point of view of a manufacturer, which I would invite you to look at from, it's a very interesting point of view. I'm saying collectively this is the result.

and later

- All what I am talking about is this thing called humanness, that that should be kept alive in the human psyche and I think, yes, this is where I agree with you, that ultimately it is. But then I have to say that corruption is a form of innocence because I can't say, oh they're not really corrupt.
- Is this what you hope, these views, that people who produce your plays in the
future, will get from them?
- I couldn't care less.
- You don't care?
- I could not care less.
- Is it over when you have written the play... But I mean you care enough to write
them, you couldn't stop writing plays...
- I care enough to write these plays because I must understand the problems of the
world I'm in.


I hope this is of interest.

Iain