Saved by Edward Bond

First published: 1966

First produced: 1965, at the Royal Court Theatre, London

Type of plot: Naturalistic

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: South London, England

Principal Characters:

• Pam, a twenty-three-year-old working-class woman
• Len, a twenty-one-year-old laborer, in love with Pam
• Fred, a twenty-one-year-old laborer, the father of Pam’s illegitimate baby
• Mary, Pam’s mother
• Harry, Pam’s father, a laborer

The Play

The play begins in the living room of the home in which Pam lives with her father and mother. Having just met Len, she has brought him home with her, and they are preparing to engage in sexual intercourse. Harry, getting ready for work, enters the room as they are settling themselves on the couch, but he says nothing and leaves immediately, allowing them to continue, rather jokingly, with the sexual act. After this encounter, Len moves in as a lodger and becomes seriously interested in Pam, but she is attracted to Fred, another, tougher young man.

In the next scene, Pam is taking care of a baby she has had with Fred. She is still living with her parents, and Len continues to board with them; he takes care of Pam—as much as she will let him, since she now despises him. Fred pays no attention to her. Mary and Harry seem to take the situation without comment, which is consistent with the fact that they do not speak to each other. Len acts as a go-between for Pam and the elusive Fred, but he has little success in getting Fred to visit her. He has even less success in pleasing Pam, who wants him to move out of her parents’ home and leave her alone. The baby, offstage much of the time, cries incessantly and is ignored by Pam.

The central scene of the play occurs in the local park, where Pam confronts Fred, begging him to visit her more often. In the ensuing quarrel she walks off, leaving the baby in its carriage for Fred to take care of, or not, as he pleases. Mocked by a gang of friends, Fred threatens to abandon the baby. Slowly at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm, the young men torment the baby. At first, Fred resists their suggestions that he join in, but as the attack on the child goes beyond pinching to punching and to throwing burning matches into the carriage, Fred gets involved. Stones are thrown at the child, and when the gang members, including Fred, flee, there is no doubt that the baby has been killed.

Fred goes to jail for the killing, having refused to name any of the other men. Pam waits faithfully for him, still trying to get Len out of the house; Len, in turn, still tries to help Pam as much as she will allow. She is sure that Fred will come to her on his release from prison. Though he is pressured to leave in order to make room for Fred, Len refuses to do so, and Pam’s parents show no inclination to evict him. On the day Fred is freed, Len accompanies Pam to meet him at a cafe near the prison, but they are not the only ones to greet the former convict. The young men who helped Fred in the murder are also on hand, as is a young girl with whom Fred was involved before the killing. Pam begs him to come with her, but he and his friends jeer at her and leave. She blames Len for failing to persuade Fred.

Things grow worse at home. Harry accuses Mary of having an affair with Len; in response, Mary smashes a hot teapot over her husband’s head. Pam is so hysterical about Fred’s refusal to join her and Len’s refusal to leave that Len is advised to keep to his room. Harry does not seem to be really upset about Len and his wife, and the two men console each other for the difficult, unhappy situation they are in, but neither of them wants to leave. Pam has no success in convincing Fred either to come to her or to take her away from the family home.

The last scene is innocently quiet. The play has come full circle, back to the family living room, where Harry is working on his football pools, Mary is clearing up the table, Pam is reading the Radio Times, and the ever-patient Len is fixing a chair. It is a tour de force of theatrical restraint, since aside from one brief request for a hammer, made by Len to Pam (she ignores him), nothing is said. Harry finishes his lottery entry and seals the envelope. Mary and Pam sit, saying nothing, on the couch. Len fixes the chair, crouching beside it, his head lying sideways on the seat. All seems well.

Dramatic Devices

Saved is an almost perfect example of the naturalist play, in which human conduct as it is played out in real life, particularly among the least fortunate members of a society, is explored relentlessly and usually without comment, and in which the forces of heredity and environment act upon characters powerless to resist. The naturalistic play is, however, more than simple documentary. It is Bond’s intention to lay blame for the reprehensible conduct of his characters on the place that they, through no fault of their own, inhabit in a capitalist society. He has, on many occasions, been accused of gratuitous brutality and sensationalism, but he belongs to a quite important movement in the theater that began in the work of Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen, who used drama not simply to entertain but also to attack social inequities.

Bond deliberately wanted to upset his audience; in Saved, therefore, he put as much sordid, dreary reality on the stage as he could, attempting to reproduce, with little artistic shaping, the desultory banality of working-class language, relationships, and conduct. The sets are kept as rudimentary as possible, and what constitutes “set” is tasteless and ugly. There is a deliberate flatness in the speech patterns, which are often regionally accurate but confined to boring incoherence. No attempt is made to make the conversations interesting; clichés pervade the supposed witty badinage of the play’s young men and women, who clearly possess extremely limited imagination. There is no attempt to make the characters look better than they might be in real life; it could be argued that Bond is determined to make them look their worst.

Consistent with this determination to avoid artistic enhancement is Bond’s deemphasis on plot and structure. The play is made up of thirteen short scenes with seemingly arbitrary jumps in time and consequence, presented without explanation, rather awkwardly plodding through the dreary day-to-day life of south London griminess. Only the murder scene has any deliberate theatrical shape. There is a constant sense that things simply happen, as they do in real life. Time means nothing. Pam meets Fred in the park; he flirts for a moment with her. Two scenes later, without any further connection shown between them, Pam is taking care of a baby she claims to be Fred’s child. After the murder, Fred spends what must have been some considerable time in prison, but there is no attempt to convey a sense of time having passed. The narrative is virtually shapeless. One thing is depicted as the same as any other; nothing really means anything, and the killing of the child is commented upon as nothing much more than an inconvenience. Life grinds on.

Critical Context

Saved is the high point (or the low point, depending upon one’s point of view) in Edward Bond’s long and prolific career of using the theater to make the British public squirm. It certainly is the play that caused him and his supporters the most public difficulty, since it was seen by many, including some theater critics, as having gone too far in exposing the emotional and moral vacuum at the heart of English working-class life. However, Bond had his supporters, including the late Sir Laurence Olivier, the most prominent British actor of the time. Olivier and others not only asserted Bond’s right to artistic freedom but also defended the theatrical quality of his work and the validity of his attack on the meaninglessness of many aspects of contemporary urban life. Bond gained renewed attention in 2001 with the New York revival of Saved. Critic Charles Isherwood, writing in Variety noted “The play’s clear-eyed observation of the interplay between need and neglect, and how people are warped by them, is as pertinent and powerful today as it was in 1965.”

Bond has continued to be an artistic gadfly. In 1971, he rewrote, or at least reinterpreted, William Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606). He stripped the play of all vestiges of heroism and tragic exultation, claiming that the modern world had no place for sublime action but needed to see the vicious scramble for power as it really was. In his adaptation, Lear is simply a nasty thug—no better than his daughters—who learns that violence will not work and that he must accept moral responsibility for what happened. A very formidable play, Lear (pr. 1971) adamantly rejects Shakespeare’s ending as pure sentimentality. Subsequently, Bond wrote Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (pr. 1973), in which he suggests that in his retirement to Stratford, Shakespeare descended to participation in money-grubbing land deals, supporting and conspiring in small-town real estate speculation.

Artistically, Bond’s work can be quite uneven. For every play of the power of Saved, there are several others that have failed badly. His plays of the mid-1980’s, including The War Plays: A Trilogy (pb. 1985), well-meaning examinations of the aftermath of nuclear war, are somewhat limited as works of art. In the late twentieth century, he brought forth such plays as Lulu: A Monster Tragedy (pr., pb. 1992), Coffee (pb. 1995, pr. 1996), Eleven Vests (pr., pb. 1997), The Crime of the Twenty-first Century (pb. 1999, pr. 2000), and, as the twenty-first century began, The Children (pr., pb. 2000) and Have I None (pr., pb. 2000).

Despite his inconsistencies, failures, and public disdain, Bond has maintained his role as one of the leading figures in a group of politically engaged British playwrights that includes David Hare and Howard Brenton. This group carries on the tradition of attacking the hypocrisies and dishonesties of British life—a tradition that began after World War II in the work of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and John Arden.

Sources for Further Study

Bond, Edwin. Edwin Bond Letters. Edited by Ian Stuart. London: Harwood, 1994.

Cohn, Ruby. “Edward Bond.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Coult, Tony. The Plays of Edward Bond. London: Methuen, 1977.

Hay, Malcolm, and Phillip Roberts. Edward Bond: A Companion to the Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978.

Mangan, Michael. Edward Bond. London: British Council, 1998.

Robert, Philip, ed. Bond on File. London: Methuen, 1985.

Scharine, R. The Plays of Edward Bond. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976.

Spencer, Jenny S. Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Trussler, Simon. Edward Bond. Harlow, England: Longman, 1976.