Bingo – Young Vic, until 31 March
Edward Bond tends to write exactly the sort of plays that you would imagine a British Marxist growing up in a declining post-war England to write. Heavily influenced by Brecht, Bond’s writing operates with a rigidly mechanistic quality that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Soviet factory. There is a brutalism to life in Bond that may have reached its apotheosis in Saved and its infamous scene of a baby stoned to death. Saved, his second play, cemented Bond’s legacy due to the role it played in the battle to overturn the Lord Chamberlain’s Office right to censor works for the stage.
Deliberately challenging his audience and a notoriously prickly individual to work with, Bond has fallen from the public eye and in recent years has worked outside of the mainstream. However the Cock Tavern in Kilburn, now sadly closed, staged a number of older plays alongside new work in 2010 and the Lyric Hammersmith took on Saved in 2011 to suggest that we may finally be rehabiliting ourselves towards one of our most overtly political playwrights.
The Young Vic has continued this process with Bingo; it is seemingly an astute choice, one of Bond’s most accessible plays featuring Shakespeare as its central protagonist, and the casting of Patrick Stewart, who originally played the role in the 1970’s, guaranteed to bring in an audience that might otherwise avoid such austere fare.
Shakespeare retains central to Britain’s cultural heritage and represents the country’s main claim to a true cultural genius to rank alongside Da Vinci and Mozart. Those individuals that command an international agreement of their stature are rare indeed and whenever their legacy is challenged people have a tendency to react defensively.
Civilian Theatre 