Bond mss., 1965-2010

Biographical Note

Edward Bond was born Thomas Edward Bond in London on July 18, 1934. As a child, he lived through the air raids and bombings of London during World War II, and at age 15, he quit schooling but continued self-education as an avid reader. From 1953-1955, he was conscripted into the British National Service, which sent him for a period to Vienna, and about this time, Bond began writing. He submitted two plays to the English Stage Company in 1958 and subsequently gained admittance to their writers' group. Bond's first staged play, The Pope's Wedding, debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962.

In 1965, he worked with the company's artistic director, William Gaskill, to stage the controversial play Saved , which included a scene where a baby is stoned to death. The Lord Chamberlain's office would only approve of a heavily censored version of the play, but Gaskill and Bond refused to cut any of the language, violence, and sexuality. Therefore, they staged the play at the Royal Court Theatre as a "club theatre" performance in order to stage it without the Lord Chamberlain's license. Nevertheless, in 1966, the Marlborough Magistrates Court found the private performance to be in violation of the 1843 Theatres' Act, which grants the Lord Chamberlain the right to censor plays, and the English Stage Company was fined. The next year, the undeterred Bond produced another controversial play, Early Morning , which was the last work to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain's office; in 1968, in a victory for anti-censorship, the Theatres' Act was repealed. To celebrate this triumph, Bond turned his plays into a trilogy ( Saved, Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Early Morning ) that was performed at the Royal Court and toured Europe in 1969.

In the 1970s, the playwright and director's relationship with the English Stage Company began to sour, and in the 1980s, the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Theatre did not have a good relationship with Bond either; this led to a decline in productions of Bond's plays in England through the 1990s. However, he enjoyed great success in France, partnering with Alain Françon at the Théâtre National De La Colline in Paris from 1997 to 2010. In 1995, he began to work with the Theatre in Education Company Big Brum to write plays for schools and youth theatres.