The Under Room and The Fool, Cock Tavern Theatre

The middle pair of plays in the Cock Tavern's Edward Bond season are very different pieces, one a chamber piece written in 2005 (and now receiving its London premier), the other an epic play first performed by at the Royal Court in 1975. Seeing them close together allows one to focus on how Bond's writing had developed in the intervening period and how he had, by the time of the chronologically latter play incorporated within his dramaturgy what I can only describe as a performed self-consciousness as to what the drama is (what Drama itself is, Bond would say).

The smaller play is The Under Room, and was performed in the cellar of the pub theatre, a location reached by going upstairs, through the regular theatre space and down again into an under room throbbing with the sound of a generator, a rectangular space with low ceilings. On the night I saw the play (the first performance of this production) the cast of The Fool with Bond himself sat directing them were rehearsing as we passed, a weirdly ghostly and haunting scene in an of itself. A complete naïf might have asked "what are they doing?" and then might, with some thought, have found the answer to that downstairs in The Under Room.


The Under Room, like most late Bond plays, is set in a dystopia which is easily believable and which would be arrived at quite quickly should a further financial collapse hit the West's economy. A police state runs Britain and, in an Orwellian act terrifying in its simplicity, allows itself to summarily shoot anyone shoplifting as the crime has been renamed "shop-looting". The story concerns one shop-looter who hides in the basement of a single woman's home and is discovered by her. The singleton, Joan, is extremely leery of the stranger at first but gradually gets drawn into his story. His is a non-European whose past has involved being a boy-soldier, whose first killing for the army who kidnapped him was one of his own parents. The stranger embroils Joan in his situation, involving her in the shady deal his is trying to pull of with a treacherous black-marketer named Jack. Jack is supposed to get the stranger a passport and a way out of the UK but instead rips off his money and blackmails Joan to find more. The stranger's presence in both Jack and Joan's life reveals them.

I structure this last sentence in the way I have so that I can get into talking about the play's central innovation – the stranger is represented by a dummy, his lines being spoken by an actor who stands to the side of the action. This simple device makes what could have been simply a representation of a dramatic situation into a way of thinking about what we do when we represent dramatic situations. Joan and Jack are revealed, they and we find out who they are by their interaction with this effigy. Of course, all dramatic characters are effigies or dummies and the dramas we watch them perform reveal the character of the other figures in the drama. There is something else though – the audience as well is pretending that these characters are real in order to find out something about themselves through the drama: Bond is conscious of the Greek beginnings of dramatic theatre, its coincidence with the beginnings of democratic society and citizenship and the imperative to "Know Thyself".  The dramatic process towards the somewhat ironic ending of The Under Room allows Joan and Jack to find out that she is a person that wanted to help the stranger for rather selfish reasons  - as an end to her singleton existence becoming a couple running away together – whereas Jack is someone who, when called to quit his low down ways and attempt make a positive contribution world with the stranger, finds himself drawn to the stranger's violently unexpected offer. Yet Jack doesn't get the chance to do this, as Joan has ripped the dummy to pieces once she finds herself rejected.

There seems to me to be a mordant critique of contemporary drama built into this. Joan's liberal selfishness, in which motives are more to do with personal wishes and ownership of the other, destroys the opportunity for Jack to change. One of the things this suggests to me is that contemporary drama, in concentrating on a liberal sentiment which demands that the "victims" of the present system be given to them as personal projects, decimates a more immediate drama which might affect a change in the aggressors and the victims themselves. It is certainly true that much of the liberal, soul-searching drama we see points towards liberal consciousness raising amongst the already-liberal middle-classes. Bond's rather caustic suggestion is that these liberals will, rather than give up their hold on the puppet strings of the victimized classes, align themselves with the extreme right and become victimizers themselves.

This could be seen as a rather despairing vision. In his programme note on Hope, Bond writes "The hope is in the audience." The very process of watching The Under Room might change an individual, or at least get them to take a good, hard look at themselves. Maybe that's hoping too much, although I can affirm that it got me feeling and thinking…

The Fool is as epic as The Under Room is condensed; it's concern is with the producer of art in society whereas, for me, The Under Room is concerned with the audience. The play tells, in eight scenes, the story of the 19th century peasant poet John Clare, staging his fringe involvement with the rural protest movement against land enclosures. The land enclosure theme, the central role given to a "great British writer" and the subtitle, Scenes of Bread and Love, show The Fool to be somewhat of a companion piece to Bond's Shakespeare play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death; Clare's own position as a "nobody" elevated by his talent into the world of the gentry and ruling class make his position somewhat analogous to a Shakespearean fool. Bond directed the Cock Tavern production himself (replacing the advertised director) and did a brilliant job of making this huge play work in the small, pub theatre space; it is an irony that his programme note also includes a satirical pop at the National Theatre, who wanted to do The Fool in the Olivier Theatre but were refused by Bond with a curt

‘You cannot do My Fair Lady one day and Macbeth the next: you cannot be Van Gogh one day and paint green-faced oriental ladies the next. You have to choose, and if you don’t what you do chooses you’. (Saunders, 2004)

The Fool is a intricately patterned play. Clare is shown as a player in a class struggle, contrasted and compared with other players (notably the agitator Darkie) and shown in antagonism with his class enemies, who are ironically also his patrons and benefactors. It is significant, for Bond as a stage writer himself and for a comparison with Bingo, that the first time we see Clare he is taking part in a Mummers play performed for the local Lord of the Manor and his preening houseguests (perhaps this is analogous to Bond's early involvement with productions of his plays at the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare company). There is a sense within the play that people are locked into their class positions, that they cannot leave them behind nor see beyond them – it is perhaps the most self-consciously Marxist of Bond's plays in terms of how its structure stages the class struggle. This might be problematic in that the play may box in its audience – yet the play is part of not the completion of a process. It is right that Bond on occasion provokes us into thinking about how at liberty a person can be in a class society. He offers a powerful rebuttal of the idea that a person can, in such an environment, be in charge of their own destiny.

The play includes two of Bond's most powerful scenes. In one, the rioting rural workers come across a country parson – an apologist for the ruling class – and proceed to strip him of his finery; when he is naked, they weep as they pluck at his well-fed flesh, mourning that its plenty has been at the expense of them and their children. The scene is striking and unforgettable – the parson (not a sympathetic character) is vulnerable and almost Christ-like in his suffering but his attackers maintain an innocence and child-like quality, as if the Church's Jesus-surrogate were being suffered to come unto the children. There's also a sense in which the scene links to those zombie films, for example Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground or Romero's Land of the Dead, in which the zombies are used to symbolize the exploitation and revolt of the proletariat against their class oppressors, as Bond's worker's come close to wrenching the parson's flesh from his bones.

The other great scene – as great a scene as has ever been written for the theatre – has Clare taking the air with his upper class patrons in Hyde Park where a vicious boxing match happens to be taking place. The boxers are two prime examples of the victims of English Imperialism – an African and an Irishman – and the alternation of focus between Clare and his literary friends and the participants in the boxing match creates a split of focus which (via their on-stage proximity) encourages an audience  to see the connection between the two groups and their ostensibly dissimilar activities.

Bond's large scale dramas often deal in the on-stage relationships between groups, relationships which stage the economic and social relationships within the societies he is writing about. The Cock Tavern production shows that Bond, even in such a tiny performing space, is adept at grouping his actors in meaningful constellations. The production gives the lie to the idea that Bond is not a good director for his work; here, he shows that he has reached a level of impressive understanding of the stage space and its dynamics, where space and communication consummate a meaningful relationship. That we are unlikely to see him showing us what space we can do on a large scale is a terrible loss for anyone interested in theatre in the UK.

Bibliography
Saunders, G. (2004). 'Edward Bond and the Celebrity of Exile'. Theatre Research International , 29, pp. 256–266.