Edward Bond was born in 1934 in a working-class suburb of London. Self-educated, experienced, he began to write plays early, while still at school, then, after abandoning his studies, he went to work in factories and offices. His modest social origins, far from being simply anecdotal, led him to be compared with certain of his peers, other playwrights also of working class origin, such as Harold Pinter, John Osborne, John Arden, David Storey, Sillicoe and Arnold Wesker, whom the English drama critics of the seventies brought together and labelled as the "angry young men", (a convenient but highly over-simplified label), because they not only renewed the conventional framework of dramatic composition of their time, but they also generally put on stage characters and situations in the context of "disadvantaged" backgrounds. They also gave vent to a spirit of protest against the orders and the politics established by the then first Labour government, that they certainly hated even more than the conservative party of the time.

As for Bond, even if he wrote that "his plays always have one eye open to what is happening in the street", he fiercely rejected membership of such a clearly defined group. The French director Claude Régy, who, in 1972, at the T.N.P. in Chaillot (Paris), directed a first production of one of his earliest plays, "Saved" (1965), confirms this. "With Bond, the cry of revolt is screamed to the point of exasperation. As with Pinter, the language is found between the words, but this is the only resemblance. Permanent understatement. Always wanting to say something else and everything at the same time." (1).
It was Guy Lauzin's production of "Narrow Road to the deep North" in 1969 which introduced Edward Bond in France, to honour the first season of the Centre Dramatique National in Nice-Côte d'Azur, then directed by Gabriel Monnet. The French drama critic, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, in Le Monde of 26th November, 1969, analysed the play thus: "Edward Bond wants to show us that colonising Christianity is as barbaric as the power struggles it replaces (…) This blanket rejection of the entire foundations of Western society is expressed in a parody of Eastern forms: narrative, convention and rhythm from Noh drama, the final hara-kiri of the monk who didn't find the truth, the symbols of the abandoned child and of the pure man saved from drowning at the last minute ..." These themes of the sacrificed child, and of the absolute quest for truth, soon prove to be like essential, obsessional motifs in most of his plays.
It was the original production of his play "Saved", presented at the Royal Court Theatre in 1965, which brought him to the attention of the general public, when the wrath of the critics and of the board of censors was kindled to the point of the police interrupting performances. Here Bond described, among other scenes, the stoning of a baby in its pram by a gang of young misfits in a park. This harsh, extreme scene earned the Institution a three-day court trial, but prestigious witnesses, such as the famous actor Laurence Olivier, passionately defended the dramatist, thus contributing to his fame, although the director who created the original production in London, William Gaskill, was nevertheless fined £50! But Bond's troubles with the forces of order were not over for all that. In 1968, the play "Early Morning" was closed by the board of censors, who believed that the offence made to the Crown warranted the pure and simple banning of the play. Indeed, Bond had recounted the licentious, Sapphic love affairs between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, but, far beyond just spurious provocation, which doesn't interest the writer at all, he was attempting to denounce the influence of the Queen's rule of conduct that still exists even today.
In France, the play "Sauvés", directed by Claude Régy, greatly divided the critics and also raised some commotion. Although it is not necessary to retranscribe here all the stormy debates which greeted the opening production, it is relevant to quote Matthieu Galey's remarks in the magazine Combat in 1972 (date of the opening production of the play in France): "The sacrifice of the child thus takes on its full meaning, it's a ritual crime, it's the murder of an innocent which atones for the sins of the world, it's the symbol of the cruelty for which we are all both responsible and victim, in a ferocious society which refuses to see itself as it is." (2). The journalist summarises quite well most of the ideological stands defended by the British dramatist. Recently, in May, 2000, in an interview given in the satirical magazine "Charlie-Hebdo", the author of "Lear" reaffirmed: "…We mustn't have a romantic view. The world and history are full of situations where we ask ourselves: "How could human beings have behaved this way? Are we just beasts?" The unthinkable can very easily become confused with the necessary. (…) This is the human plan: to create justice. And that is what the theatre talks about. All plays are a quest for justice. And if they aren't, they're lying. Which is also quite pleasant, because you get the feeling you're still a child. To obtain justice, what we need is an accurate description of reality. The truth therefore becomes useful - which it wasn't for the child. But where, in society, are you going to find the truth? It's a problem." (3)
Bond has therefore not departed from his conviction, already stated in 1972, regarding his Marxist conception of the theatre: "Art is the confrontation between justice and law and order." His whole work reveals this concern: a play like "Summer" (1982) closely combines the interests and the preoccupations of both public and private order, and the famous "War Plays" 1 & 2 (1985) state the atomic danger threatening the planet. At the same time, in order to question the civil and social commitment of the artist, the writer quite markedly and effectively moves beyond the complex felt by most contemporary British authors, who are impressed by the looming shadow of Shakespeare, and doesn't hesitate to freely "plunder" the author of Hamlet, going so far as to place him directly on stage and under question ("Bingo", 1973) or to rewrite, in his own way and with his own obsessions, his version of the famous "Lear" (1971).
In this play, truth and lies, childhood and old age, humanity and animality, death and life cannot be separated by neat dividing lines but, on the contrary, all blend together: " There is no-one from whom I can ask for justice" and "I have suffered so much, I have made all the mistakes on earth and I am paying for every one of them. I cannot be forgotten. I am in people's minds. To kill me, you have to kill them all. Yes, that's what I am. Listen, Cordelia. You have two enemies, lies and truth. You sacrifice truth to destroy lies and you sacrifice life to destroy death. It's absurd. You hold a stone until your hand bleeds and you call that a miracle. I am old, and I am as weak and clumsy as a child, too heavy for my legs. But I have learned this and you too must learn it or you will die" (4), states Lear at the end of the play, dazed, seeking mercy to keep away the burning flames of madness. If there is redemption, it is only at the price of suffering, of maturing and of ordeals which strip him of his power and make him grow up, leading him to at last accede to life, after having grown old.
"Lear is rather like a child who grows up and who learns to live. He was protected by the cradle of his court until he became an old man and then suddenly he was born," wrote Edward Bond, in regard to his play.
Thus it can be seen, in referring to the plays which we have rapidly mentioned here, how the dramatist's dialectic is crystallised in this figure of innocence, the child, sacrificed then rehabilitated in the end to safeguard and maintain a touch of humanity. The final, silent scene of "Sauvés", after scenes that have coldly presented these acts of violence, shows one of the play's protagonists in the living room, within the circle of the family put back together with great difficulty, "repairing", pathetically of course, but carefully,
the rung of a crippled chair. The end of "Lear" has the same echo: "I see my life, a black tree on the edge of a lake. The branches are covered with tears. The light shines through the tears. The wind blows the tears up into the sky. And my tears fall back down on me." (4) Compassion, an antidote for madness, is an emotion which, in the same way as salutary rebellion against all established, oppressive orders, reveals man's confusion and his capacity to perhaps be touched. But, even more than this simple tendency to tears and pity, it is in the possibility of Man's transformation that Edward Bond believes.
It's this same "utopia", for which the theatre seems to be the ideal vehicle, which is also at the heart of the preoccupations of director, Christophe Perton, whose favourite themes are "dream and revelation, transformation and metamorphoses" and their implications, but of course, taken up and examined in different ways, aesthetically and politically, according to the works themselves, their contexts and periods. "In the space of a lifetime, people are sometimes, perhaps often, confronted by the ordeal of a transformation, whether they understand it or not. An insignificant or a colossal event can turn our life upside down. And it's that instant, that event, which interests me, I want to talk about that, to delve into it … " declares Perton. After Peter Handke's "Les Gens déraisonnables sont en voie de disparition" in 1998, which targeted the same issue, the writing of "Lear", in which the poetic, the epic and the ideological share equally the most inspired lines, could not help but cross the path of this artist newly arrived at Valence to join Philippe Delaigue in the artistic direction of a theatre undergoing rapid change, the Comédie of Valence. In January, 2001, it is to become one of the new Centres Dramatiques Nationaux which, thus inaugurated beneath the aegis and the auspices of Bond's play, will follow rigorously and faithfully, we hope, the new paths of a dramatic art that is committed and, at the same time, careful to make the lively and impassioned voices of today's most fervent dramatists be heard.

(1) In Le Monde, 6th January, 1972, interview by Martin Even.
(2) Matthieu Galey, "Le scandale du désespoir", in the magazine Combat, 14th January, 1972. (3) "La religion est une pièce de théâtre qui prétend être vraie.", an interview with Edward Bond, published in Charlie-Hebdo, 31st May, 2000. (Interviewed by Mona Chollet and Luz.)
(4) Edward Bond, Lear, translated into French by Georges Bas, translation reviewed and adapted, November, 2000.