When Time Thickens and Takes on Flesh: Chronotopic Exploration of Edward Bond’s Paris Pentad Plays

Abstract

This paper tries to explore the chronotopic implications of Edward Bond’s Paris Pentad Plays including Coffee (1996), The Crime of the Twenty-first Century (2001), Born (2006), People (2006) and Innocence (2009) in general and the recently staged play People in particular.1 None of these five plays is a ‘history play’ in the technical sense of the term. Yet, the ominous Auschwitz modality is the chronotopic backdrop of all these five plays. These plays operate by way of premise more than plot, staging events in World History ranging between the Nazi Camps, the Nuclear Holocaust down to the Abu-Gharib atrocities or the shock-and-awe techniques in the War-on-Terror to argue for their connections over times. The plays shift meaning from the characters that are tethered to specific times and places to events that are untethered to linear time and identifiable topos. Thus Bond’s dramaturgy manages to break out of the “folk-mythological time” chronotope to which Bakhtin relegates Drama (Dialogic 104). Rather, the paper argues, Bondian lack of ‘the sense of an ending’2 dovetails with Bakhtin’s chronotopic vision to underline the importance of Open Time and human agency. The plays bring home what Bakhtin calls “the state of non-alibi” in “the event of being”, the realization of which could be the only impulse towards assuming ethical responsibility (Towards 70).