"Dea" (Seacombe Theatre, 26 May)

The story of how Edward Bond's most recent play--directed by Himself--wound up being performed in a suburban theatre in Sutton (named for Harry Seacombe no less) is at least as interesting as anything that happens in this play itself. I'm not the world's biggest fan of Saved (1965), Bond's most famous play, with its humans-are-apes-innit prolesploitation aesthetic: the kind of philosophy better shrugged off with a weary sigh than taken seriously by anyone over fifteen, and (I fear) partly to blame for the end of any collective will to construct social housing. From interviews, Bond fifty years on is still doing that angry-male-playwright-dickhead thing: all the theatre you like is rubbish, the National won't stage my plays, War Horse is worse than invading Iraq, bourgeois pig-dogs etc. The end result felt like a student play given a better production than it deserved without quite the level of professional stagecraft it intended, down to bits of furniture being bonked into the set during scene changes. 

Script-wise, this was the worst sort of objectionable masculinist stodge: a big bag of parts that never came together. The motivations of the central character--of any character, really--were at best opaque. At worst, this read like the writing of a fourteen-year-old who had read a bunch of Jacobean tragedy, but needed to spend more time in mixed-gender company. Babies are murdered with all of the ceremony of answered telephones; rapes duly handed out by male stereotypes to impassive female sufferers. (Is the world made better because a woman is raped onstage?) This is that familiar grab-bag of stage grot that Bond himself stands somewhat responsible for; and as often this sort of thing leaves the audience with nothing to do--no way in, no place for critique. To that growing pile of terrible, dreadful parts for women that I have seen recently, I might particularly cite the unnamed female character in act two, who spends the entire sequence with a cloth bag over her head, is duly shot, and then placed at the receiving end of a necrophile gang rape. Indeed a literal summary of what happens onstage gets pretty Pythonesque pretty quickly. The symbolic elements also became exhausted--and incontinent--pretty quickly: a field of children appears and disappears offstage; for some reason a table collapses, and is then unsuccessfully put back together. 

All credit, again, to the actors, who did about as much with this dialogue as I think could be done. The ensemble of soldiers in act 2 were particularly strong; however ridiculous as a concept, watching them being goaded into a rape by their commanding officer was as harrowing as anything I've seen on stage this year. There was a moment when an actor walked off stage to detonate himself with an IED where I felt, for a queer moment, as though I was myself about to be blown to bits; this despite the IED itself being pretty clearly composed of those energy-saving halogen bulbs we're all being encouraged to use. (Does this sound like a strange evening? It was a strange evening.)

The whole event unfolded as a singular vision, in the worst possible way. This did not feel as though it had been developed in collaboration with anyone else--someone who might, say, have pointed out that a dying character can only go offstage and then spring back onstage twice before it seems ridiculous; who might have helped bring any symbolic unity whatsoever to the piece; who might, finally, have pointed out that this was violent pornography absent of even the most basic insight into what women--called every terrible name in the book--are like. There was no social vision here, no particular depiction of any recognizable human life. It felt more like masturbatory rape pornography responding to the preoccupations of the far left under New Labour--not just a blinkered worldview, but an out-of-date one.

When Bond started ranting in the 60s about the entire theatre industry playing to a pacified audience, who needed to be shocked out of their complacency, this critique might have been more necessary. Since then, however, the theater has rather retreated as a mass entertainment. This play's punishment of those who sit through it, however, raises profound questions about audience: who, exactly, might be imagined voyaging an hour out of Saint Pancras to see a play about (as I remember it) rape, rape, incest, necrophile rape, and more incest? Are we complacent theatergoers? I've rarely felt prouder to be in an audience, actually, than this one: judging from everyone I spoke to at interval, everyone was the right kind of bored with this. 

This play was the waste it lamented: of time, of energy, of youth. This production, these actors--even the Methuen edition of the play sold at the box office--were the sort of opportunity that a young writer could have used to establish themselves, to have done something new. Instead, this was a sour evening spent indulging an exhausted perspective on the world. I feel angriest about my generation's lot--politically, economically, and culturally--when I see things like this, as the political arguments of the 60s are brought endlessly to life. (This was necrophilia on and offstage--but not clever enough to realize it.) It's time to get angry: this is an older generation squeezing the life out of several younger ones, on and offstage. My congratulations to the NT, the Royal Court, and to all of the other rejecting playhouses mentioned in Bond's interviews: whatever you were putting on last night, you fulfilled your duty to the nation by ignoring this.