“Brecht Is A War Criminal”

I‘ve been talking too much. I can tell because my coffee is cold.”

It’s about 45 minutes into my meeting with Edward Bond, and about five weeks since I realised it was frankly unacceptable that I did not know who he was. His is a name you may have heard attached to things in the cultural ether; probably in relation to his shocking play Saved, or maybe the film Walkabout (more famous, perhaps, for a naked Jenny Agutter than for his screenplay).

Yet I had no reason to think him an icon until studying his work for a European Theatre module this year, his 50th anniversary of becoming a playwright. This series of coincidences collided in the kind of realisation I wish I had had years ago: that Edward Bond is a theatrical godsend, a writer with incredible punch. Our lecturer – who liaised with me to arrange the interview – summed it up best: the three most important British playwrights this century are Beckett, Pinter and Bond.

I was warned before our encounter that Bond is something of a cantankerous old man with strong views and a soft voice. It was therefore with some trepidation that I, a mud-splattered and tote bag-wielding arts student, arrived to have coffee with him at Radcliffe House. However, upon first sight, Edward Bond had more in common with the assorted uncles and grandfathers of friends from my village who one sees sitting contented with their equally-aged partner over a pint in a well secluded corner; utterly charming but clearly content in solitude.

Edward greeted me with incredible kindness and warmth, and upon learning that I was a student journalist asked if I had been corrupted yet with a knowing laugh. One might worry, when speaking to a man so crucial for his time in English theatre, but of such age, that maybe one might find his views antique or his manner boring. Neither of these were the case. Though with a polite volume to his voice, at moments he reaches a fierce crescendo of wide-eyed blazing spirits, and his conversation is so riveting that sometimes one feels weighed down with such respect you want to cry. Bond is a normal man, yes. But a man who speaks the words we need to hear more often.

I started off by asking him about the content of a speech sent to me as a sort of wider reading for the interview itself. “I’m rather proud of it”, he said with a smile expressing a hard job done well. ‘‘I’ve been doing a lot of theoretical stuff at the minute, I don’t really enjoy doing it.” I was particularly intrigued, in this respect, by the opinions expressed here on Bertolt Brecht, an eminent figure in the development of a particular type of European theatre during the 20th century.

Bond speaks of him with great anger, and sometimes in terms that, out of context, make him sound aggressive. When he branded Brecht a “war criminal” upon my mention of him I feared I might get caught in one of these tempests, but I was not. It is not so much an issue with Brecht, it seems, but what he represents. “People think I’m being anti-German: I’m not, it’s a very European phenomenon, but it just had a more immediate effect on the Germans for obvious historical reasons.”

Bond has strong opinions on theatre at the moment. He speaks of something “sinister” brewing in the development of current theatrical practice. He describes Simon Stephen’s Three Kingdoms, a show some have lauded as a gamechanging production in the course of our approach to theatre, as causing “a feeling of intellectual despair”, although he proclaims Stephens a very capable writer. “Stephens chose a German director because Germans are obsessed with death”, he says, and Stephens similarly wrote the adaptation of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time because autism is a miraculous mental occurrence, “a torture that gives you the brains of Einstein”.

He would certainly seem to be right about German theatre being obsessed with death. “Most German plays have chainsaws,” he adds to a tale of a particularly gory German production of an American play about the economy – “it’s a wonderful cliché”. Then again, his views of post-Brechtian German theatre, a theatre that influenced Three Kingdoms, begins to make more sense than just condemning Brecht outright: “they cut the person up and so on and there’s blood all over the place and then the language gets almost medieval, and the intensity of the acting… You just think: you’re lying. All that angst, that pathos, is avoiding the subject.”

What Bond seems to care about most, is saying something that matters, and saying something true. Bond is a man concerned with worlds and the ideas at their core, not so much the people affected by them. But he does not wish to explore these concepts through directorial watermarks of style, “now if you go to see somebody’s Lear you just see the director’s Lear,” he remarks. “What happens is that the director takes over, and you get all these gimmicks and all these tricks. It is very, very destructive because they have no authenticity and therefore they have to keep trying to be bizarre or extraordinary in some way and very often dramatic reality isn’t bizarre in that way.” Bond provides an example of his favourite moment of dramatic reality, a line from Lear: ‘prithee, undo this button’. “That’s a very simple line, that’s Lear. He’s given away his kingdom, he’s gone mad, he’s told God to get off the bloody universe, and then…” With this, Bond does a heartbreakingly accurate performance of an old man begging silently for the loosening of a collar button, an espresso shot of powerful punch that shows just why this line is what it means to him.

Bond expresses his reasoning for why he thinks so many plays at the moments are lacking something he enjoys as being because “it is very difficult for people in general to actually grasp what is culturally, economically and politically going on. You can turn it into myths and stories and be ironic about it but actually to tell someone what is happening at the moment… That’s difficult to get out. And because it’s not easy to get at and lots of options have been exhausted in the last 30 years, it’s almost as if writers get lost, and this is very strange.”
Yet, it seems not all writers are causing the despair that Three Kingdoms and others have caused. “I’m not being condescending when I say I admire what young writers do,” says Bond with incredible sincerity. “They have an immediacy, and it’s not just facile, it has a depth too.” However, I quizzed him on his opinions on The Royal Court as an avenue for young playwrights to get their work out there. “Don’t go to the Court,” he said, fervently, recalling his famous moments of butting heads with Max Stafford-Clarke, “but go inside yourself, read the classics, find what gives your life meaning.” In the midst of this we discuss the plays being produced at the moment, including the recent heavily-lauded Royal Court success Jerusalem.

“It’s News of the World morality, Mills & Boon sentimental rubbish,” he says, and I have to agree with him. It is nice to see a man who has turned against the pantheon and the texts we are beginning to reify of recent and see him not just want to ruffle feathers, but genuinely want to beat back against the current of change, to look back and see how things could be done.

As Bond is happy to point out, it’s been a long time since he turned his back on the English stage. I could not help but ask about staging his play The Woman at the National Theatre. “The Woman was a very interesting experience because it was on the Olivier stage. I walked onto the stage and asked what the curtain around the stage was. They said there was a wall behind, so I asked them to pull the curtains away and there was this wonderful wall of aluminium that had been painted black. So I asked them to take the paint off, and they put it on my production costs… it was absolutely necessary.”

I was intrigued by stories I had read in other interviews about the cast changing from Bond’s directorial vision within a few shows into an overly theatrical performance. “We worked on the text,; said Bond with a humility for his approach, “I said the text is doing this, that and the other. And we had a run-through, and I remember distinctly they were saying ‘God this is amazing, we need to do this in future’, and you know, I just thought we were doing the play and trying to work out what the play needed. It was fine, it was different and they got excited. Then it went into production and I came back after four performances and it was all gone. It was Stoppard, this facile style.”

So how can an actor prevent themselves from being theatrical and not dramatic? This is an important distinction that Bond defines between different forms of performance. “That’s not a simple question,” he says with a smile as the cogs whirr, “and a very important question. Theatre is really about acting. But you have to understand that one night these actors would be in my play, another they’d be in God knows what and they’d be rehearsing Guys and Dolls. You can’t do it. To be creative you have to commit yourself to something or you are committed to something.”

As he says the word ‘can’t’ his eyes flash and his voice raises; there is the force there that one hears in his writing. “Van Gogh can paint Van Gogh, but he can’t get up and paint Picasso. He can’t do it. And now we’re supposed to take part in TV culture and then the next day we need to do Lear. You can’t. It’s just grotesque. It’s just not possible. We cannot act Lear, we cannot act Hamlet, because it will not consent to be part of our culture.” He provides the example of David Tennant; “he could have been very good in Hamlet if the director had known what he was doing. I remember reading this headline in a newspaper report: ‘A Hamlet For Our Age’. He says ‘woo woo’. Well actually, Hamlet says ‘to be or not to be’. And that’s the difference between humanity needing Hamlet and the corrupt culture we are part of.” Bond’s disdain for the institution of televisual and cinematic acting seems absolute – he despises his own films because they are never the films he wrote, and insists nobody watch them.

I asked him to expand on what he thinks actors need to do if this ‘TV/film culture’ is not to corrupt something about theatre. “I think character’s very important – I write characters I think are vivid and real, or at least I hope actors can make them this. What I say now is, in this play The Edge, we say to the actors; ‘you’re in this world during this scene, and you’re in another world during the next scene. In one world this happens, another this happens’. That’s very different from what Chekov says or Ibsen or Stanislavski. They’re trying to create a new sort of human personality for the world that sees everything changing around them. But now we need to look at how the world is made up, and that is very different. If you behaved in the lecture theatre the way you behave in the kitchen, you’re not going to pass your exams. A drama will try and take this idea, so that the world keeps changing. Its the same world, you’re the same person, you have to be consistent, but every time you enter another world it will ask you who you are.”

For a second, Bond pauses and looks up somewhere, and then speaks something that feels like it has been dusted off just for me. “I have a little story,” he starts, “I don’t know how to write it, but it fascinates me. What if the world is set on fire and it totally burns. All the buildings are black, the plants are hanging down, the walls covered in scum. And some aliens come down from Mars and see this totally dead, decayed world, and they look at the trees and they think that’s how trees grow here. And then they’re walking through the ruins and they find a 5p piece. A little 5p piece. In the ruins. This coin that has survived. And the moment they see that the whole of that reality changes. If you push something to an extreme, a human being produces a 5p piece. It’s like a ripped seam, and when you find it everything changes. If you follow the model I gesture at, that’s where you get the really big performances.”

I was intrigued as to what he finds in actors away from our country that makes them so much better suited than some of our homegrown talent. He told me of Yvonne Bryceland, an actress who had been working with Fugard in South Africa, who he brought to the National to be in The Woman because the theatre’s company had nobody who could. He has story after story of watching directors, acclaimed directors, take scripts and actors and not give them respect or knowledge they deserve, of asking them to remain dumb to the full work and only care about their character, to only do what the director tells them and not to do anything for themselves to realise the play itself.

“I always insist… you won’t be able to do it unless you play the play,” he says with the firm belief of a man who has been around long enough to know this to be so. “25 years ago I gave up English theatre and went to work in France. French theatre has its faults but – and oddly I found this too in America – when I went to go work with the actors on a production of one of my plays they were all in Broadway shows, but because Broadway shows go on for about fifteen years and they get leaves of absence to go and do something they want to do, the respect they had for their craft, the patience, the care, is extraordinary… because normally they’re not allowed to do it. The English want to do Guys and Dolls and it destroys them, and when the Americans are doing it they don’t want to.”

Finally I asked about his work with younger actors and audiences. “It’s not actually true I work a lot with young people. I write a lot for young people. Big Brum do that,” but he has a constant smile when he talks of the times he does work with young people. “I say drama is about the kitchen table and the edge of the universe, for children they’re the same. We write specifically for children and we never have to write down. You can deal with very, very profound topics with a young audience because you are asking them who they are, and adults might say ‘I don’t know, but I’ve got X pounds in my bank account if that’s what you mean.’ Its an extraordinary truth how close those kids are to drama. And then they’re going to get fobbed off with Jerusalem or Strictly Come Dancing.”

Meeting Edward Bond was an unexpected experience, but one impossible to replace. His wisdom and his kindness create a feeling of being in the presence of something all-consuming, and it was really something. Later that evening, at a Scratch Night of his work and work inspired by it by Warwick students (including myself) he was surrounded by gabbing assistants who called out ‘Edward’ with the pride of getting the attention of a great man. At one point, during a production, he walked on stage and tore the book from an actor’s hand because it blocked his face, revealing his script beneath.

The act sent ripples through the entire audience, unsure of its intention. As the piece ended, he smiled and came on to apologise and explain himself as the applause died down. The ability to be fierce and yet humble, to shock and yet to give relief, seemed symptomatic of Bond’s milieu, a canon of work that, if we are to read it with his hopes for the future of theatre and acting he has described, might contain a great deal more of the optimism he hopes we find in it than we at first believed. Let us hope we can all find that 5p piece.