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Topic Summary

Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: May 27, 2012, 02:04:47 AM »

Just saw Chair, The Under Room and Have I None.  A long evening- 18:00 to 23:00!  The plays would have been better performed separately instead of the marathon session.

I sat close to Bond in the audience and he asked his companion how long the plays ran for.  A strange question for someone who directs two of them.  And the premature clapping for The Under Room, twice people mistook the end of a scene for the end of the play, may have been wishful thinking as the audience squirmed in their seats.
Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: October 29, 2011, 07:54:12 PM »

A pseudo review but actually just bad journalism.  It is by Quentin Letts from the Daily Mail 13 Oct 2011.

"It is hard to see who will derive much satisfaction from Edward Bond’s unexpectedly boring play. The only notable scene is one in which a baby is stoned to death..."

"Mr Bond’s scene... lacks power. In the middle of it all, I found myself succumbing to a huge yawn."

Does anyone believe this?  A yawn at the most journalistically dramatic moment.

"Bond is a dogmatic clunker..."  So why did the reviewer say the play was "unexpectedly boring"?

A shoddy piece of writing.  You can read the full text here
www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2048877/Shakespeare-aint-Edward-Bonds-Saved-fails-shock.html

Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: October 21, 2011, 05:31:23 PM »

A thoughtful review of Saved at the Lyric Hammersmith, London.

It is by Paul Taylor in The Independent, 18 October 2011

"... In Sean Holmes's austerely eloquent production, Saved emerges as a superbly structured drama of prophetic power. Bond's alienated, rootless, working-class youths, with their stunted speech-patterns and penchant for casual violence, seemed exotic to the original reviewers. ...

"...Watching Holmes's hard-hitting, yet sensitive production, I was struck by several related things. One is that the progression of scenes, performed against a stark white backdrop with the actors as stage hands, has a patience and deliberation that grants each of them an equal weight."

"...The episode in which a gang of youths stone an abandoned baby in its pram is presented here with an extraordinary feel for the sickening rhythms whereby puerile joshing escalates to frenzied nihilism. But because Bond refuses to make this violence a sensational climax, he denies you the consolation of blaming it on the universe and forces you think in terms of a rectifiable social wrong."

... the plays ends with the lovely, almost dance-like finale in which Len scrupulously mends a chair. In that taking of control, a glimmer of hope."

The full review is here
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/saved-lyric-hammersmith-london-2371949.html
Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: October 18, 2011, 12:26:03 PM »

Laurence Olivier on Saved "Saved is not a play for children but it is for grown-ups and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it."

The quote comes from here
www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/apr/23/theatre.samanthaellis
Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: October 16, 2011, 02:47:39 PM »

"Acid tongue" by Mark Ravenhill in The Guardian, 9 Sept 2006.  You can read the full article here:
www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/sep/09/theatre.stage

"...The play was not easy to read. Bond had stripped away all the conventional rhetoric of British theatre. The great speeches of Shakespeare, Congreve, Shaw and Osborne had all gone. Instead the characters communicated in terse, demotic lines, often speaking only a few words at a time. The action progressed as much through a series of stark visual images as it did through words - from the opening, a comically deadpan seduction scene, to the final quiet hope of Len mending a chair."

"His was a world I instantly recognised. The world of listless, rootless youth, casual acts of sex and random acts of violence in south London parks..."

"And what I loved about it was that it didn't offer up any immediate analysis: there was no obvious author's voice, no scenes of debate that might guide me to come to the "right" conclusion. The events of the play were presented sharply, starkly, but somehow you could sense the voice of the author - shrewd, inquiring, with an ear for the cruel comedy in our everyday battles for status."

"...Bond had clearly learned more than any other English dramatist from Brecht. He understood the way the dramatist can create a tension between word and picture, between narrative and character. And, as with Brecht, his characters existed in a robustly materialist world. There's a scene in The Sea that embodies this brilliantly. It begins with the careful cutting of cloth by the shopkeeper Hatch but descends into a frenzied destruction of his stock as he is humiliated by Mrs Raffi. The scene demands that the actor learn and present the skills of a draper - and the physical objects and social situation of the scene are as important as the breakdown that Hatch experiences."
Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: October 07, 2011, 04:30:29 PM »

You can hear Bond in conversation in the Lyric Hammersmith, where Saved is running, on 10 October 2011.

Details are here
www.lyric.co.uk/whats-on/production/in-conversation-saved/?pes=Studio
Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: May 10, 2011, 11:32:42 AM »

Edward Bond's Saved, rarely seen, will come to London's Lyric Hammersmith theatre from 6 Oct- 5 Nov 2011.

In 2012 the Lyric will also present Chair, The Under Room and Have I None.

Details are here:
www.lyric.co.uk