Edward Bond Book order (chronological)

The book delves into the historical interplay between theatre and societal crises, highlighting how stage plays have served as a medium for exploring contemporary challenges and predicting future events. It examines the role of live theatre from ancient Greek times to the present, illustrating how audiences have sought understanding and insight during turbulent political, social, and economic periods. This collection invites readers to reflect on the questions raised by theatre in the face of uncertainty.

Five outstanding plays from the British theatre of the 1960s. This volume contains major works by five of the most important playwrights ot emerge during the late fifties and early sixties. Bold, challenging and iconoclastic, these plays are landmarks of post-war British theatre. Roots by Arnold Wesker focuses on the homecoming of young Beatie Bryant who returns to her family of Norfolk farm workers with stories of her boyfriend Ronnie. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance by John Arden is set in a mining town in the 19th century, with a group of soldiers returned from a colonial war. But when Musgrave is asked to keep the peace with the colliery workers, he decides to do so in a rather unusual way. Loot by Joe Orton is a brilliant parody of the skeleton-in-the-cupboard crime genre, exploding the very notions of English decency, good citizenry and traditional 'positions'. Edward Bond's Early Morning re-imagines the time of Victoria and Albert caught up in a military coup plotted by Disraeli. Peter Barnes' Ruling Class describes the fall out in an aristocratic family after the 14th Earl commits suicide and leaves his estate to a schizophrenic Franciscan friar who is under the illusion that he is Jesus.

Restoration is set in eighteenth-century England: a world of cruelty, injustice and iron privilege. Lord Are is forced by poverty into an unwanted marriage with the daughter of a wealthy mineowner. One morning, during breakfast, he commits a bizarre and fatal crime. He seeks to pin responsibility for it on his guileless, illiterate footman, Bob Hedges. A battle ensues between Bob's black, justice-hungry wife and the fortified privilege of the ruling classes. This is a new programme text edition of the play with minor revisions to the original text and produced for the tour by Oxford Staeg Company.

Two new plays from Britain's most challenging dramatist Have I None and The Children are both set in a late-21st-century apocalyptic landscape where human behaviour is monitored, living spaces are designated and where any emotional displays are immediately eradicated. In The Children a teenager's unquestioning loyalty to his mother has fatal consequences, while in Have I None a couple's lives are irreversibly changed by the appearance of a disturbing stranger who questions their existence.Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

Described by its author as 'almost irresponsibly optimistic', Saved is a play set in London in the sixties. Its subject is the cultural poverty and frustration of a generation of young people on the dole and living on council estates. The play was first staged privately in November 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, before members of the English Stage Society in a time when plays were still censored. With its scenes of violence, including the stoning of a baby, Saved became a notorious play and a cause celebre. In a letter to the Observer, Sir Laurence Olivier wrote: '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.' Saved has had a marked influence on a whole new generation writing in the 1990s.Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

Edward Bond (né à Londres en 1934) est le dramaturge engagé le mieux connu en Grande-Bretagne. Le premier volume de ce coffret regroupe ses lettres ; le second, ses écrits théoriques ainsi que ses poèmes.