• Next message: Hardy M. Cook: "Re: Chimes at Midnight"
• Previous message: Hardy M. Cook: "Roth on Verse"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ]

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.2298  Monday, 10 December 2000

From:           Werner Brönnimann <Werner.Broennimann@unibas.ch>
Date:           Monday, 11 Dec 2000 11:43:05 +0000
Subject:        Bingo

It is true that unlike Bertolt Brecht Edward Bond has no access to the
gift of comic relief, neither as a dramatist nor as a person.
Nevertheless his plays have been an important contribution to the
European theatre scene of the 1960s and 1970s; his Saved with its
notorious child-stoning scene was a shocker in its time, but to this day
I prefer to be shocked by the forewarning savagery of Saved rather than
by murders like the Bulger case or its transatlantic parallels.  Bond
should still stir us.  It was Tom Matheson of the Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare Institute who first drew my attention to Bingo, and I
subsequently taught the play in a course on King Lear, with Bond's own
Lear also on the syllabus.  I believe that the necessity of including
historical and economic materials in the teaching of Shakespeare is best
motivated by the confrontation with provocatively jaundiced views such
as afforded by Bingo, and its final scenes, with Jonson's complaint that
he resents Shakespeare's picking of his brains, and the snow-storm
finale are very powerful.  Bond's Bingo is particularly unfashionable
these days, I suspect, for its inexorably negative presentation of the
women in Shakespeare's life, particularly of the greedy and insensitive
Judith, giving a particular edge to Miranda's conciliatory "Good wombs
have borne bad sons".  Bingo was successfully paired with The Tempest at
the Young Vic in 1995 (TLS July 28 1995).

Werner Brönnimann
Basel University

• Next message: Hardy M. Cook: "Re: Chimes at Midnight"
• Previous message: Hardy M. Cook: "Roth on Verse"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ]