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APPENDICES
APPENDIX F
INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD BOND
London, 9" September 2011
by Ädäm Bethlenfalvy
AB: You write about dramatizing the analysis of a situation. What do you
mean by this?
EB: Well, the superficial answer first, then I will try to be more helpful.
The superficial answer is, and this is what happens with directors now, they
just take the surface text and find gimmicks and tricks to make it work. They
do things with lights and that sort of thing. Whereas, to dramatize the analysis
is completely different. Because you are dramatizing the meaning of what is
there on stage. Now the meaning on the stage can’t be abstract, it has to be
built into the situation. Hamlet is not going to say to somebody “excuse me
a moment, I just want to go off and make a soliloquy”, as if he is going to have
a pee, or something. No, the soliloquy comes out of the conflicts within the
scene. So, you have to dramatize what that is. If I can give you a practical
example in Eleven Vests, when that was first done, the moment in the last
scene where the guy who has been bayonetted sits up and takes the bayonet
and cleans it. Now, when I first saw on stage, it was in a rehearsal, the soldier
was lying flat and suddenly he pops up like that, and he was like a ghost,
and it was very-very effective, very powerful, but it was wrong. Because, that
gave you an answer, the man is dead, or nearly dead and he is going to be
a ghost, or something like that. So you have an answer but you don’t have
a problem. You have a problem like are there ghosts or not, an entirely false,
spurious problem. You know, if I ever meet one I will ask it, but it doesn’t
happen. So you have a different problem, why does this dying man want to
clean the bayonet he was killed with? Now that is very strange and it opens up
problems from the centre of the play. What a bad director would do is make
the soldier come up like a ghost and there would probably be some strange
lighting effect. It’s all supernatural and I want to say: no, no, no. This is when
you have to get back to the coffee cups, and knives and forks of reality. What
the objective reality consists of. It’s like the scene we have been dealing with
(Scene 11, Saved), it is a very early scene that I have written and it does use
ghost imagery and that sort of thing, but it is also like “I have got to pack my
case, I have got to put something into the case” I would probably make it more
specific now, but even at that time I was using that to open up the question
whether he should stay or not stay. Am I making sense?