Oldal 140 [140]
FACILITATING ‘BEING’ IN THE SITUATION — STRUCTURES USED IN LTD AND BONDIAN DRAMA
on how the situation advances. However, there are dissimilarities between
the different examples related to how much the challenges faced in the drama
are brought about because of dominant socio-cultural elements within
the fictional world.
The problems in all examples from Bond’s plays are strongly connected to
the social site impacting on the personal situation of the roles. Even though
it is not always apparent, the wider social context is strongly present in even
the most intimate situations in Bond’s plays. I have quoted Bond before saying
that “a dramatist must be an extremophile”,°° and that the extremes are
present also in the choices the roles have to face. For example in The Children
Joe has to choose between losing the love of his mother or burning down
a house, the choice is extreme and also contradictory, because after making
such a sacrifice it becomes impossible for them to communicate with each
other. The decisions made in the play also come to create constraints for
the characters that force them into making further impossible choices.
The plays also report the consequences of the choices made through
the development of the situations and the circumstances.
Bond also makes the situations extreme by showing the contradictions
within the characters, like in the case of the Man in The Children, analysed
in chapter two. In this case it is a sudden moment of deep humanity revealing
itself in a monstrous role which creates an unresolvable contradiction as it
suggests that it is actually the love for his child that made the Man a child
murderer. Bond himself also clarifies in an essay what he means by extreme.
He says that “not all dramas need to be set in extreme situations. All that is
necessary is to enact the articulation of the paradox, the way the self’s need
for justice is misused in society”.°”°
The way Bond structures the extremes in his plays is also very important.
In certain cases he starts from the trivial and develops it to the extreme.
For example the famous stoning of the pram in Saved*” starts from the young
men pushing around the pram and driving it across one of the character’s
jacket. This becomes the trigger of the incident that then develops step by step
into the stoning of the baby. The other important characteristic of the plays
is that they revisit the underlying problem or contradiction again and again
in different situations so the audience can see how the various roles relate to
them and take them to the extreme.
The central problem that relates to Bond’s theory and is also apparent
through different situations in his plays is the contradiction arising from
the human need to be at home in the world and how this is manipulated
and misused by social ideologies. The paradox arising from the clash between
5% Bond: Freedom and Drama, 213.
506 Bond: The Cap, xxxiii.
507 Edward Bond: Saved, in Plays: One, London, Eyre Methuen, 1977, 19-136.
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