SAVED by Edward Bond Plays at the New Stage Thru May 6

Edward Bond's 'Saved' plays at the New Stage through May 6, 2010.

Edward Bond is a member of the generation of British playwrights born in the 1930s and ‘40s who markedly influenced not only British but also world drama. His contemporaries include Caryl Churchill, David Storey and Tom Stoppard. Bond is considered as an inspirer and forerunner of British "cool" drama that conquered the world in the 1990s. The furore around Bond's play Saved was instrumental in the abolition of the censorship which had been applied in Britain since 1737.When the English Stage Company put on the play in 1965, it was prosecuted by the Lord Chamberlain's Office and subsequently lost the dispute. A passionate campaign against censorship ensued, with Parliament ultimately abolishing it. For us, it symbolically happened in 1968, when the play was staged in Czechoslovakia (?inoherní klub, stage director: Ladislav Smo?ek). Bond's plays were originally banned in Britain for their alleged immorality. Saved is a bitter sociological analysis of a spiritually empty society unable to give rein to feelings, relations, communication. The play's central scene, in which a gang of hooligans out of sheer boredom stone to death a baby in its pram, with one of the murderers being the child's possible father, is an apocalyptic image having no analogy in the history of theatre. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to perceive it as a celebration of violence. Bond's characters do not enjoy violence, they do not enjoy anything; they do not care about anything and are not interested in anything. Their social frustration suddenly explodes and thereafter their lives continue without meaning. Bond's plays are a condemnation of a world in which a lack of love and compassion result in a callosity that takes the gruesome for normal.

Translation: Jan Han?il
Director: Michal Do?ekal
Stage design: Jan Dušek
Costumes: Zuzana Krejzková
Dramaturgy: Lenka Kolihová Havlíková

For performance schedules and more information, click here.

 

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