Unifaun Theatre Productions returns with Olly’s Prison, a play by Edward Bond, reputed to be one of the greatest living playwrights. He shares with Lizzie Eldridge his thoughts on a number of subjects.
Censorship. All censorship of views, opinions, beliefs and information is wrong. It’s a relic of the days of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics. No government can claim to be democratic when it uses the undemocratic institution of censorship.
If Sophocles and Euripides were alive now, they would not write for the Royal National Theatre or the West End
Authority claims that its strongest argument for censorship is that it protects the vulnerable. Really, this is its weakest argument.
The vulnerable need to be exposed to the things they are vulnerable to. Then they can learn to protect themselves against them. In that way they become stronger than the things that once made them vulnerable.
Drama. My aim in drama has been constant. I spent my early childhood in a war. That made the problem of violence urgent and it made me sceptical.
I saw that society was unjust and that the justifications for this were themselves unjustified. But the justifications become ‘beliefs’ that distort our behaviour.
A dictator once said if you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one. But it remains a lie – and if you’re going to believe a lie you do so more dogmatically and become intolerant and violent.
My plays are not in themselves violent – they contact the violence that is buried in society and hidden in the everyday. That is the absolute text of my plays.
Society and the human relations it fosters are violent, not my plays. You can’t fail to notice that my plays are based on ordinary, everyday life. But they show how extraordinary that life is.
Hope. Where is the hope in my plays? The hope is in the audience. On a profound level, drama obliges them – even forces them – to hope.
The violence in my plays never imitates the sad, sordid, sickening, clichéd, depraved violence of the cinema and telly-drama. And I never use violence as a solution.
Violence will always be a problem. Violence is not the original sin of human nature, it is the malady of society.
When someone says my play seems “unsparing in its depiction of the dark and miserable depths of humanity”, that isn’t true.
That’s how you see it because that’s what our culture teaches you to see. It confuses what people do with what they are.
My plays show why they do what they do. Modern drama is about situations.
My characters don’t understand themselves because they don’t understand their situations. Ironically, if they could watch the play they are in, they would take the censor’s pessimistic view of themselves: they are bad. Or, to give it a bit of theological chic, evil.
I create these characters so that the audience may understand themselves and their situation. Whether I am hopeful doesn’t matter; though if you had no hope you would be writing the world’s suicide note and I don’t see the point of that, because there would soon be no one left to read it.
Audiences. Drama has to be about people in their situation. If you divide the situation and the individual from each other, then you can exploit and abuse people and they will thank you for it – because they will not know where they are. You will be able to pin almost any identity on them.
But if you put the individual and their situation together, you have an almost universal truth. In different cultures it will have different aspects but the core truth will remain.
In Olly, a father kills his daughter because she won’t obey his order. The play was performed to a local audience, in a hot village square in Africa.
When the father killed his daughter the women in the audience wept. The men applauded.
Afterwards, a community leader said: “Edward Bond writes for Africa.” The play had released the violence at the heart of their social culture.
The women saw their innocence. The men had been taught to repress – censor – their innocence and therefore to hate and attack. They were self-victimisers.
Another of my plays is set in the same working-class London area that Olly’s Prison is set in. A few days ago, a Colombian woman told me the play is exactly about living and dying in the vicious civil war in the jungle and cities of Colombia.
When directors and actors understand how to stage my plays – and that means they have understood what the plays are about – then the audience understand them. This is because they are about basic human situations and our need for justice. They work wherever there is human hope.
Drama now. My first plays were staged in the London Royal Court Theatre. They precipitated the abolishing of theatre censorship, a process that changed British theatre. The reactionary critics regarded me as the absolute leper of moral impurity.
The main, established theatres carried on serving culturally calorie-saturated junk food to the entertainment market.
At first this was out of their need to obtain government funding. Later, and inevitably, it was out of inclination and because of a diligently acquired competence in being trivial.
Those theatres began to avoid my plays. Now, when they try to stage them they find it almost impossible.
Instead, I have worked outside London, mainly abroad, and in England for Big Brum Theatre because it specialises in drama for schools and for young adults.
If Sophocles and Euripides were alive now, they would not write for the Royal National Theatre or the West End. They would write for Big Brum. I could not be more serious.
If Shakespeare were alive now, he would not allow the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage his plays. He would not choose to see his craft wasted.
He would write for Big Brum. If you doubt that, you don’t know how debased our culture has become.
I don’t ask you to take my word for it. Recently, the artistic director of the London Royal Court Theatre said that my moral purity – purity! – prevents me from making contact with an audience.
Perhaps the problem is that his ‘marketable impurity’ has made it impossible for him to make contact with my plays.
I want to end by being very serious. We are ‘the dramatic species’. That means that drama is the absolute structure of our being.
But our theatres – the ones I’ve been talking about – can no longer put a human being on stage. That’s because they no longer know how to stage the problems that make us human.
Malta is at the heart of the Mediterranean, which is the birthplace of our civilisation and so of our drama. If it could be said: “Edward Bond writes for Africa”, I would like to say: “I write for Malta.”
Olly’s Prison runs at St James Cavalier on March 8, 9, 15 - 17, 22- 24.
www.sjcav.org