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Home
Authors
Edward Bond
English
Playwright
About the author
What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Play
You have to learn the language of Hamlet.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Language
You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Drama
When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#People
#Difference
#Walking
#Radical
What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Being
#Question
#Shakespeare
We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Will
#End
#May
We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#People
#History
#Living
Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Solution
#Violence
Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Democracy
#Violence
The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Truth
The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Theatre
The one overall structure in my plays is language.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Language
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Society
#Mind
#Drama
The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Extreme
If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#People
#Will
Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Will
#Needs
#Government
#Economy
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#English
#Punishment
I'm interested in the real world.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#World
I'm not interested in an imaginary world.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#World
In the end I think theatre has only one subject: justice.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#End
#Justice
#Theatre
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Past
#Experience
#Goodness
It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Society
#Religion
#Debate
#Goodness
#Drama
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Democracy
#Ideas
#Violence
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Shakespeare
#Answers
It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Play
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Now
#Being
#Drama
#Theatre
It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Play
#Opinion
Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Unconscious
I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#World
#Money
I think there is no world without theatre.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#World
#Theatre
I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Will
#Job
#Theatre
#Propaganda
Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Humanity
First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Now
#People
#First
#Devil
#Animals
#Theatre
Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Time
#Years
#Production
#Waste
Auschwitz is a place in which tragedy cannot occur.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Tragedy
All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Now
#Being
#Society
#Community
#Objectives
#Competition
But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#World
#Change
Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Art
#Society
#Reality
At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive.
Edward Bond,
English
Playwright
#Theatre