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The War Plays

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The War Plays
Front cover of a 1998 release containing the trilogy
Written byEdward Bond
Date premiered29 May 1985 (1985-05-29) (Red Black and Ignorant)
29 May 1985 (1985-05-29) (The Tin Can People)
17 July 1985 (1985-07-17) (Great Peace)
25 July 1985 (1985-07-25) (Trilogy)[1]
Original languageEnglish
SubjectNuclear war

The War Plays (sometimes referred to as The War Trilogy) is the name often given to a trilogy of plays by English dramatist Edward Bond: Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People, and Great Peace.

Reception

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Max Stafford-Clark has written that with the Barbican production of The War Plays, Bond "reduced a talented cast into a stumbling and incoherent shambles of walking wounded. Edward Bond is simply the most difficult person I have worked with in 40 years."[2] In 1996, author Janelle G. Reinelt described the English reception as "chilly".[3] Author Michael Mangan commented that the 1995 Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe performance was quite successful, however, and that in France the work "was described as the most important play written since the Second World War."[4]

While Bond is best known for his plays in the 1960s and 1970s, Peter Billingham in 2007 referred to The War Trilogy as one of his major late works (along with Restoration, Coffee, and Born).[5] They were collectively listed by Michael Billington as one of the five greatest works of dystopian drama. He dubbed them "[d]isquieting, dystopian and too important to be ignored."[6] In a 2018 thesis, Chien-Cheng Chen listed the trilogy as a highlight among the contemporary British dramas he had read, and lauded "its versatile use of dramatic forms and its profound exploration of modern human conditions."[7]

In The Performance of Power (1991), Reinelt compared the trilogy favorably with other works of contemporary British theatre that contain utopian elements, saying that "the combination of socialist and feminist issues raised in [...] The War Plays best approaches the imaginative task of conceiving and embodying an alternative reality. [...] [the plays] address important issues concerning the socialization of family roles. They deconstruct the notion of 'natural' mother, with its associations of an instinctual bond between mother and child based on birthing, and replace it with a notion of community nurturing".[8]

Conversely, Keith Colquhoun called the plays "particularly unremitting in tone".[9] In a 2010 thesis, Frank A. Torma criticized “Bond’s attempt in his epic works, like The War Plays and Human Cannon, to give the characters poetry to say in direct address to the audience. Bond’s poetic voice is not exceptional and the result of its insertion in his plays negatively postpones the dramatic flow.”[10] After seeing a 2010 performance of Red Black and Ignorant directed by Maja Milatovic-Ovadia, Ian Shuttleworth of Financial Times wrote, "Bond shows his skill at flinty poetry, but also includes some crass agitprop, and even when his writing feels prophetic it seems like the prophecy of a Cassandra, encouraging repudiation rather than consideration."[11]

References

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  1. ^ Bond Plays: 6 – The War Plays; Choruses from After the Assassinations. Bloomsbury Academic. 1998. ISBN 0413704009.
  2. ^ Stafford-Clark, Max (9 January 2008). "Letters: Why I fell out with Edward Bond". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  3. ^ Reinelt, Janelle G. (1996). After Brecht: British Epic Theater. University of Michigan Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-472-08408-1.
  4. ^ Saunders, Graham (2004). "Edward Bond & the celebrity of exile" (PDF). Theatre Research International. 29 (3). Cambridge University Press: 256–266. doi:10.1017/S0307883304000665. S2CID 194096667.
  5. ^ Bond, Edward; Billingham, Peter (2007). "Drama and the Human: Reflections at the Start of a Millennium". PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. 29 (3): 1–14. doi:10.1162/pajj.2007.29.3.1. ISSN 1520-281X. JSTOR 30131055. S2CID 57568352.
  6. ^ Billington, Michael (19 February 2014). "Never mind 1984: Michael Billington's top five theatrical dystopias". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 30 March 2021.
  7. ^ Chen, Chien-Cheng (July 2018). The Later Edward Bond: Subjectivity, Dramaturgy, and Performance (PDF) (Thesis). University of London. Retrieved 29 March 2021.
  8. ^ Case, Sue-Ellen; Reinelt, Janelle G. (1991). "Theorizing Utopia: Edward Bond's War Plays". The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. University of Iowa Press. pp. 221–223. ISBN 9781587290343.
  9. ^ Connell, Penelope Lee (1988). Shifts of Distance in Five Plays by Edward Bond (PDF) (Thesis). The University of British Columbia. Retrieved 19 July 2020.
  10. ^ Torma, Frank A. (2010). A Character Type in the Plays of Edward Bond (Thesis). The Ohio State University. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  11. ^ Shuttleworth, Ian (4 November 2010). "There Will Be More/Red, Black and Ignorant, Cock Tavern, London". Financial Times. Retrieved 20 July 2020.
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