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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. + 139 +
