Maison d'arrêt is a play containing a very radical critique of the functioning of Western society.
It reveals the mechanisms by which our imagination, our inner self, our biological being is corrupted, contaminated and transformed by that which constitutes the dominant ideology of our time (the cult of the praise of money and the manipulation of technology, the normalisation of relations of dominance, etc), and these mechanisms, according to Bond, prevent people today and youth in particular from envisaging any kind of future, apart from a tiny glimpse of hope for regained freedom..
Bond wrote this play in 1992, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like other intellectuals, he knew that the henceforth total domination of "the democratico-capitalist state" required that the task confronting thinkers had to be approached differently, that is, without illusion. This play provides an initial response..
Bond is one of those who think that our history must be faced up to squarely, that this history has "gone bankrupt" and that it is the evaluation of this bankruptcy that we will be able to rebuild. He thus proposes to look at reality in the face: "the eyes looking through the holes". He is one of those who think that camps, as Giorgio Agamben explains, make up a secret matrix of the public space in which we live..
"The camp really is the place where modernity was inaugurated: the first space where public and private events, political life and biological life become absolutely indistinct. For, having been cut off from the political community and reduced to bare life (and, what's more, to a life "which isn't worth living"), the inhabitant of a camp is, in fact, an absolutely private person. And yet, at no time can he find refuge in privacy and it is precisely this indiscernible aspect which creates the specific anxiety of the camp." in Moyens sans fins by Giorgio Agamben..
To "dismantle" these mechanisms and to test their consequences in the theatre, Bond has devised a dramatic work which puts into play characters who, in order to survive, build up their internal prison, wall after wall. Among those who are not to survive, one is "saved", the very one who committed a terrible crime. On being confronted with a series of "situations", he will experience the shame of being a man (that spoken of by Primo Levi), and from this experience, he will be brought to form hypotheses about how his own alienation functions. Simple hypotheses but that offer a new possibility of learning, that is, the idea of a possible future..
"Whoever has felt the silent shame of being human has cut off within himself all links with the political power in which he lives. It nourishes his thinking and inaugurates a revolution and an exodus the end of which he barely manages to glimpse." Giorgio Agamben, ibid.

May 2001