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DIFFERENT THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF DEs — SURVEY OF LITERATURE
connections, ! as is the case with the huge red ‘X’ painted on the outside of
the door in The Broken Bowl.* While this sign has an important impact within
the story, its object is not clear when it appears and needs to be allocated
to it by the audience. Katafiasz points out that the use of interplay between
signifier and object can be traced back to ancient tragedies, and this tradition
has been developed further by Bond.**? She concludes that “when signifiers
are challenged, as they are by both comedy and tragedy, social habits and
ideologies come under scrutiny”.?®*
Chris Cooper links the creation of a DE to the “practice of cathexing
objects to constantly recreate the meanings of a situation”.**° Cathexis
is a concept used by Bond, referring to the how the meaning and value of
everyday objects can change according to how they are used in different
situations.°®° I discuss this concept in detail further on. Cooper argues that
objects can be used to explore “living contradictions, and conflicts between
the different strata’ and also how the ‘individual negotiates this in the face of
a given situation”.**’ He states that it is the task of the actors to search for these
contradictions, and that it depends on how the objects are used in the given
moments whether these contradictions are opened up. One of the useful
examples given by Cooper is from the last scene of Eleven Vests, a Bond play
that shows the journey of the Student who is accused by the Headmaster
of cutting up a book, and then a school uniform jacket. We see the Student
stab the Headmaster, and later we see him being taught to use the bayonet.
In the final scene we see him stab an enemy soldier in the guts in revenge for
shooting the Student’s comrade. Cooper offers a moment of rehearsal work
done with the participation of Edward Bond to highlight the importance of
the how objects are used to create a DE.
It was blocked so that the Enemy rose up from lying on his back to a sitting
up position, the Student confronted by himself. [...] Edward got us to focus on
the actions of a dying man who has not been bayoneted efficiently because of
the anxiety of the Student. The rework was very ‘material’ and focussed the audience
on the action (a Theatre Event) of a dying man using the vest he had surrendered
with to wipe his own blood from the bayonet that had been used to kill him.?*®
w
œ
Kate Katafiasz: Familiarity without contempt: theorising Bond’s ‘accident time’, Unpublished
conference paper presented at Bond@50 Conference, Warwick University, 2 November, 2012
Edward Bond: The Broken Bowl, in Plays 10, London, Bloomsbury Methuen, 2018.
Katafiasz: Staging Reality, 30
384 Ibid., 31.
385 Chris Cooper: Making a World of difference. A DICE resource for practitioners on educational
theatre and drama, Budapest, DICE Consortium, 2010, 30.
386 Bond: The Cap, xiv.
387 Chris Cooper: Edward Bond and the Big Brum plays, in David Davis (ed.): Edward Bond and
the Dramatic Child, Stoke on Trent, Trentham Books, 2005, 60.
388 Ibid.
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