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LIVING THROUGH DRAMA AND BONDIAN DRAMA
Connections Between Being in the Situation in LTD and Drama Events
The other strong connection between LTD and Bond’s work is the nature of
being in the fiction. While the structures of enhancing it are different, all four
examined drama practitioners are making it possible for the participants to
enter fictional situations and ‘be’ in them. Bond states that actors need to be
present in the fictional situation and talks about enactment instead of acting,
because he sees human presence as a core element of drama. He says?" that
"when actors cant bring the human presence on stage, but instead produce
a manufactured style that apes it, then drama is impossible”.””’
Awareness of beingina fictional worldisimportantin bothcases. Wesawthat
this was achieved in different ways by different practitioners in the examples
of LTDs. Bond believes that drama offers possibilities to understand ourselves
and society because “the audience do this under the protection of fiction,
in ‘the suspension of belief”.*”? There is also a very conscious play between
reality and fiction in Bond’s plays that aims at questioning how real is what
we consider to be reality.
Davis compares Bond with other European playwrights and also the work
of Bolton and Heathcote in the following way:
In dealing with the problem of re-cognising society, Bolton and Heathcote are
dealing with the same problems faced by European playwrights from Ibsen to
Brecht and Bond. However, the immediate engagement, the ‘being’ in role of
Bolton, I suggest, is qualitatively different to the distancing of Heathcote. This
Brechtian distancing influence, or flavour, I argue, has largely come to dominate
much of drama education, particularly in the UK, not necessarily in a political
sense but in the way the role is framed in relation to the event. This qualitative
difference is also to be found in the way Bond places the audience compared with
Brecht.?”
As can be seen from this quote the investigation of how ‘being’ in the fiction
is created in Bond’s plays will be also useful for developing Living Through
Drama.
220 Bond does not use regular punctuation in his writing. I have quoted him keeping the original
punctuation, Iam marking this here as a footnote rather than including [sic] at all such points.
Edward Bond: The First Word, Unpublished Essay, BOND@50 Conference, Warwick
University, 2012, 2.
Edward Bond: A Short and Troubled Essay on Being Human, Unpublished essay, Personal
communication, 22 August, 2012, 9.
Davis: Imagining the Real, 30.
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