Post-Auschwitz Dramaturgy: Toward the Later Edward Bond

Abstract

Although British playwright Edward Bond is well known for his early plays during the 1960s–80s, his later works, from the late 1990s onward, have been relatively overlooked and underexplored. In this article, I aim to bridge these two phases and propose a theoretical framework to approach Bond’s evolution as a playwright. I will first examine Bond’s critical engagement with Brecht, and then I will proceed to analyse Bond’s evolving dramaturgy of the Holocaust, which will help to demonstrate how Bond has developed what we might call his post-Auschwitz dramaturgy. While criticizing Brecht’s theatre for being the “Theatre of Auschwitz,” Bond bases his post-Brechtian dramaturgy on his specific understanding of the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Bond regards Auschwitz as not only a localized historical event but also a trans-historical structure of biopolitics, manifested in both the camp and an ensuing neoliberal capitalist system. By drawing on two pivotal passages of the Palermo improvisation (which took place in 1983) and the Russian guard’s story, both of which Bond describes in “Commentary on The War Plays” (1991), I will elucidate how these examples herald a “post-Auschwitz” dramaturgical model that can be understood through Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics. Building on this analysis, I will analyse Bond’s plays The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (1999) and Born (2006) to argue that it is the dissonance between the biopolitical paradigm exemplified in Auschwitz and the human subject’s fundamental creativity that defines Bond’s later works.