EARLY WORK

The first series of plays is the one about which there is the least to say. Between 1957 and 1961, when he began work on The Pope's Wedding, Bond wrote about fifteen plays for radio, stage and television. Little is known about any of them except for their titles: they include The Tragedy, Silo's New Ruins and The Performance (radio plays); The Broken Shepherdess (a play for television) and stage plays A Woman Weeping, The Asses of Kish, and Klaxon in Atreus’ Palace, and some of the plays and fragments which were later written for the Royal Court Theatre Writers’ Group. None of these early works are now available for reading or performance; like many mature artists, Bond is somewhat embarrassed by his juvenilia, which he describes as being ‘well meaning and incompetent – totally incompetent. And rather embarrassing to read, I should think’. While there is nothing to be said about these individual playtexts, there is a point to be made about the general nature of Bond's period of apprenticeship: that it was spent writing plays in isolation, sending them off for consideration, and having most of them rejected and returned. This is, perhaps, the classic, almost archetypal, experience of the young writer, whether poet, novelist or playwright. It is, however, in contrast to the experience of the later radical playwrights who, in the sixties, followed Bond into the cultural limelight and with whom he is often associated. Writers such as Howard Brenton and David Hare and many of their contemporaries and successors learned their craft in a very different way. Their earliest works were often written and performed at university (Bond was largely self-educated), after which they formed small touring companies to perform their plays, or else had their work put on in London fringe theatres. Theirs was, in short, a communal, collaborative and essentially theatrical apprenticeship, taking place in the rehearsal room as much as at the typewriter.