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Women in Edward Bond

by Susana Nicolás Román (Author)
©2018 Edited Collection 190 Pages

Summary

This book focuses on an unexplored area of Edward Bond’s writing. While different studies examine the violence present in his plays or his dramatic theory, questions around his powerful female characters have remained unsolved. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. The human condition that Bond depicts in his plays is not gender-oriented. From his early plays, Edward Bond has been considered misogynist, but this book presents the possibility to discover a different Bond as a writer on women with powerful voices.
The reader of this book will discover in these women female spokeswomen of revolution, committed and suffering mothers but also the personification of evil and wickedness. Emotions and ideas will be analyzed in these pages in a journey through Bond’s feminine universe closer to reality than to stage. Justice, the essence of humanity or the nature of oppression are dealt with through the construction of brilliant characters with no possibility of catharsis. This vision of drama as a social forum clearly exemplifies Bond’s defense on the possibility of change.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication Page
  • About the editor
  • About the book
  • Citability of the eBook
  • Contents
  • Introduction
  • My Female Characters
  • An interview with Edward Bond by Susana Nicolás Román
  • Are We Saved yet? Riot, Revival and the Feminine Passive in Saved
  • A warning
  • Riot and revival
  • The neighbor
  • The feminine passive
  • Bibliography
  • Female Wickedness and Violence: Narrow Road to the Deep North and Lear
  • Narrow Road to the Deep North: Georgina
  • Lear: revisiting the bard through violence16
  • Cordelia, the Stalinist leader
  • Conclusions
  • Bibliography
  • The Revolutionary Woman in Human Cannon
  • Reading the text, discovering the heroine
  • Bibliography
  • “Four-square behind the Sputum”: Dramatic Form, Female Characters and Implacable Politics in Restoration and Summer
  • ‘The door is open’: Oppression and Complicity in Restoration
  • ‘If I could live to spit in her face’: Exploitation and Atrocity in Summer
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Other Mothers Courage: The War Plays
  • Bibliography
  • Castrated Ladies: Bond’s Mirthless Mothers
  • Introduction
  • Castration
  • Bond’s dramatic method
  • Sally in Tune
  • Donna in Born
  • Joan in The Under Room
  • Works Cited
  • Strong and Active Women in the Big Brum Plays
  • Big Brum and Edward Bond
  • A small theatre company with limited resources
  • Archetypes
  • Mothers and Sons
  • Sara, Viv, Joan and The Girl – Antigone revisited
  • Sara
  • Viv
  • Joan
  • The Girl
  • The Angry Roads
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography

Introduction

Women in Bond focuses on an unexplored area of Edward Bond’s writing. While different studies have examined the violence present in his plays or his dramatic theory, questions around his powerful female characters have remained unsolved. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. Remarkably, the presence of women in Bond’s plays is dominant in contrast to his contemporary playwrights. Female protagonists and powerful secondary characters abound in Bond from the beginning of his career. And the author himself has often stated that he was interested in women’s problems. Yet, the metaphysical human condition Bond describes is not gender-specific. Bond’s human world is one that inscribes its figures in an apocalyptic aura, but it is a world in which the word ‘human’ subsumes both male and female voices without prevailing conditions.

This collection approaches femininity focusing on the importance of the historical and social context in which women grow as characters. This project has mainly concentrated on women in Bond’s plays, describing and studying their evolution; discussing the forces that influenced their depiction; and illustrating their significance in his writing, and more generally, their relation to the depiction of women in modern society. In the following chapters, Bond’s progress in the conception and delineation of female characters will be analyzed through a grouping of plays which mark distinctive stages of development.

In his early plays from Saved (1965) until The Woman (1978), we find oppressed women with the only possibility to show their presence in the world through violence. Bond himself assumed that men are the same as women for this effect: “I put women on an equal status with men: they have to accept responsibility for changing their society, not merely be its victims, acquiescing or otherwise” (Stuart, 1995: 201). We find powerful examples of female evil in Early Morning, Lear, Narrow Road to the Deep North or The Sea. The characterization of these figures aligns different traces to femininity such as religious obsession, sexual power or craving desire for extreme torture. The later female-focused plays can be interpreted as depictions of female responses to the same suffering and limit situations. From The Woman, Bond’s main domain is on political and social heroines in different historical contexts. Opposingly to the early women, these heroines (Restoration, Human Cannon, The War Plays, Summer) take action and change their society becoming the voice of the author and his political commitment.←9 | 10→

In the first chapter, Bond himself states through a conversation with the editor his approach to femininity focusing on the historical and social context in which women grow as ‘fictional-real’ characters. His approach takes distance from feminism to delve into the inequality of both men and women in a corrupted culture. This chapter provides a complete overview of Bond’s production from his early plays investigating more into oppressed women until his more recent plays portraying heroines. From The Woman (1975), Bond’s main domain is on political and social heroines in different historical contexts. The Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust or the Trojan Wars serve the playwright to contextualize and denounce the repetition of human mistakes along history. In contrast to the early women, these heroines take action and change their society becoming the voice of the author and his political commitment. References to Greek tragedies or other sources of inspiration in Bond’s creative process will be unveiled along these pages. This conversation with Bond provides an interesting outline on his main female protagonists and clarifies some complex issues from the point of the view of the author-creator.

In the second chapter, Sam Haddow will propose a revision of Saved and its controversies in the twenty-first century context through Holmes’ production. Kristeva and Freud will be approached as theoretical framework to depict the complex ‘female passivity’ present in the play. The author will also argue that the ‘warning’ initiated by Saved in 1965 has changed shape by the 2011 England riots.

In the following chapter, Susana Nicolas explores the idea of female wickedness in Lear and Narrow Road to the Deep North. Subverting the biological justification of female wickedness in King Lear, Bond’s proposal does not admit the natural distinction between good and evil. Equaling his male and female voices as terror agents, this revision focuses on a new reinterpretation of the moral and political challenges present in the plays. Chapter four will explore the revolutionary women in Bond’s writing through the fascinating figure of Agustina in Human Cannon. This woman voices the guerrilla fighters during the Spanish Civil War through collective fight. Bond has recognized that this female character represents one of his main exponents of politically committed women.

Harry Derbyshire analyses Restoration and Summer and their women as potential examples of progressive attitudes within patriarchal societies in specific historical settings. The author will also establish comparisons with canonical figures such as Lady Bracknell or Hedda Gabler and parallels with female playwrights of the twentieth century. Summer’s naturalistic approach is argued as anticipation and influence over the controversial Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Chapter six by David Tuaillon will describe how in The War Plays and after, Bond changes his main model of female characters as political heroin through an interest on ←10 | 11→motherhood as a metaphor of the alienation of society and experiment new ways of critical analysis and opens new dramatic perspectives. Beyond Brecht’s Mother Courage, Bond’s mothers voice examples of collectivity and humanity in violent and apocalyptic settings.

The chapter ‘Castrated Ladies’ will look at Sally from Tune and Joan from The Under Room. It will explore how these ‘Bondian’ women suffer from not having ‘swords up their skirts’, but are instead historioculturally gendered as people who are seen, and do not themselves ‘see’. These women fall for the lies and deceptions of their male counterparts, and make decisions based on cultural ideologies rather than seeing situations for themselves. They do not understand their own vulnerability. By identifying with them, audience members might usefully, (perhaps painfully) see their own gendered ways of making meaning reflected back at them. Kate Katafiasz will use a Lacanian and Althusserian theory to elucidate how Bond dramatizes the means by which society ‘interpellates’ subjects, to enculture them in binary categories as ‘good citizens’ or ‘criminals’, ‘sadist’ or ‘masochist’, ‘voyeurs ‘ or ‘exhibitionists’, ‘fantasists’ and ‘realists’ to name a few.

Chris Cooper will develop Bond’s collaboration with Big Brum Theatre-in-Education Company since 1995 during which time he has written 9 new plays for young people that have toured to schools, colleges and theatres. The women in these plays are prominent, complex and rich characters, offering in most of them a powerful angle of connection for young audiences. This chapter will guide the reader through the women in the plays with a particular focus on the Big Brum Mothers and the responsibilities of mothering and nurturing children in an unjust and inhuman world.

The reader will discover in Women in Bond female spokeswomen of revolution, committed and suffering mothers but also the personification of evil and wickedness. Unfortunately, not all women characters are present in this book. There are other extraordinary figures like Dea (Dea, in Plays: 10, 2018) that will hopefully find an appropriate place to be explored in future projects. This book attempts to show a representation of Bond’s female universe in his conception of humanity. Women are not differently approached to men in Bond’s writings but undoubtedly, her visions offer an alternative perspective to his understanding of humankind and rationality. Emotions and ideas will be analyzed in these pages in a journey through Bond’s feminine universe closer to reality than to stage←11 | 12→←12 | 13→

My Female Characters

An interview with Edward Bond by Susana Nicolás Román

I think that from the beginning I knew it was not appropriate for me to write from the point of view of feminism. It was already absolutely clear to me that inequality between men and women was unjust and harmful to both. It corrupted culture. I wondered what particular attention a just society might give to women- how it would cater for the needs of living with pregnancy and early motherhood for months. A woman friend told me “not to go down that route.” I took her advice. The feminist movement could deal with it. So instead I dealt with what questions women in a fully emancipated society would face- the questions of war and of justice when the moral imperative was confronted by the practicalities of choice. But rather than trying to deal with that in an imagined emancipated society, I did it in our present sort of societies. This was because I wanted to show what humanness cost us already. That cost would also be part of women’s struggle for emancipation. But placing women in the situations occupied by men, and facing women with these questions, would also be creative for men. They would rediscover what the problems involved and what solving them cost, and how destructive it was to ideologize- or worse, glamorize, their male solutions. Traditionally men have not only often loaded the burden of work on women. They have also burdened them with their consciences. This is why I wrote plays such as The Woman, Human Cannon, Jackets and The War Plays.

Details

Pages
190
Publication Year
2018
ISBN (PDF)
9783631774434
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631774441
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631774458
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631773659
DOI
10.3726/b15005
Language
English
Publication date
2019 (February)
Keywords
British Contemporary Drama Female characters Dramatic form
Published
Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien. 2018. 190 pp.

Biographical notes

Susana Nicolás Román (Author)

Susana Nicolás Román is lecturer in the English Department at the University of Almeria (Spain). She holds a PhD in English contemporary theatre. She has published extensively on educational drama and Edward Bond’s plays. She is the author of two books about the female characters in Bond and editor of a volume on the use of drama in CLIL. Her research areas focus on the connection between theatre and social education, innovation in foreign language teaching and acting skills as resources to enhance motivation. She is an active collaborator in theatre projects in Spain and has recently coedited a volume about the interpretation of female evils through film/stage and other literary forms.

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Title: Women in Edward Bond