Lear (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Edward Bond was born on July 18, 1934, to working class parents in Holloway, a North London suburb in England. When World War II began in 1939, Bond, like many children, was evacuated to the countryside. Even so, he was exposed to the violence of the war, the bombings, the continual sense of danger, all of which helped to shape Bond’s image of the world as a violent place. Bond’s education was interrupted by the war, and he left school for good at fifteen. He worked in factories and offices and served for two years in the British army. In his early twenties, he began writing plays.

At this time, in the 1950s, a new generation of playwrights was beginning to revolutionize British drama. These playwrights included John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley), and Harold Pinter (The Homecoming). As a group, they moved away from the predictable, even insipid, British post-war theater to create drama, often political, that was new and vibrant. Bond eventually became one of this group of new playwrights.

Bond wrote a number of plays before his first staged work, The Pope’s Wedding, was produced in 1962. Although that play contained some violence, it was not until the production of Saved (1965), a play that includes an onstage depiction of the stoning of a baby, that Bond became notorious for the extreme violence of his work. The Lord Chamberlain, a public official responsible at the time for maintaining moral standards in British theater, heavily censored the original script. The eventual production of the play, in its entirety in 1965 at the Royal Court, resulted in the theater being prosecuted and fined.

Bond’s next play, Early Morning, produced in 1968, featured cannibalism. It was the last play banned by the Lord Chamberlain before censorship in the British theater was abolished that same year. Other important plays by Bond include Lear (1971), Bingo (1971), and Restoration (1968). He has also written two volumes of poetry and a number of screenplays, including Walkabout (1971), directed by Nicolas Roeg.

In his later work, Bond continues to be noted for the violence in his writing. A socialist and atheist, he is also known for the highly political content of his plays, and by the 1990s was considered a major voice in the British theater.