"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."
