Dehumanized or Inhuman: Doubles in Edward Bond

Abstract

question of how the playwright's stated purpose of developing a theater is realized in a body of work that seems more nearly mythic than realistic. Even a superficial review of article titles confirms the centrality of this interest in reconciling the political and the poetic aspects of Bond's work.1 Again and again, the critics return a set of ideas and themes that are, as Jenny S. Spencer notes, quite direct and uncomplicated.2 Their concern is not unwarranted. Bond's theater is political, and his focus of investigation is nothing less than the survival of all the human, humane qualities of the political animal, the dweller in a contemporary polis. Yet the discussion of these relatively simple (in abstract formulation) ideas is rarely simple and seldom uncomplicated. Spencer herself characterizes Bond's work as an attempt to representations of reality (mediated by theatrical convention in the same way ideology mediates perception) which are both recognizable as our own world, and yet untenable (in need of change).3 The convolutions of syntax in Spencer's discussion represent difficult convolutions of thought, from the doubly metaphorical present representations-of reality, of convention, of ideology as filtered by perception-to the paradox of an impossibility which is immediately recognizable, her parenthetical style reflecting the difficulty of writing about rational drama in an irrational world. To use a currently fashionable term, Bond's poetic dramas deconstruct dominant myths of perceptions, of conventions, and of ideologies in the controlled application of a few carefully chosen images. Ruby Cohn is quite correct in her characterization of Bond's theater as fabulous;4 indeed, Bond's work develops a reasoning man's fable of our times. Where the traditional fables of Aesop use animals demonstrate human foibles, Bond's modem fables utilize a similar, if more subtle, version of this technique by surrounding characters with images of dehumanization or metaphors connecting them animals.