Plays 3 (Paperback)

This collected volume contains three plays which continue Edward Bond's exploration of themes from Shakespeare and other classical authors. Bingo puts Shakespeare himself on stage in a critical account of the writer and Stratford landowner's final days. The Fool is based on the life and madness of the 19th-century working-class poet John Clare and The Woman is set at the end of the Trojan War with Hecuba as a main character, but instead of offering a resolution its Tempest-like second half defines the nature of social conflict. All three plays deal with the origins of the tensions of the modern world. Also included is Stone, a one-act parable of oppression.

Edward Bond is "a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright" (Independent)

"Edward Bond is the most radical playwright to emerge from the sixties ... the most savagely powerful dramatist writing today ... Bond's plays cannot be ignored."—Independent

Bingo: "A magnificent play: spare, lean, poetic, yet rich in themes and ideas and full of suppressed agony and pain."—Guardian

The Fool: "Bond's carved prose must be the envy and the goal of half the playwrights in Britain."—Observer

The Woman: "A play as complex and ambitious as anything British drama has offered us for a decade ... a play with the riddling tenacity of a classic and the most inventive use of Homeric legend since Giradoux's Tiger at the Gates"—Guardian

Stone: "A vivid, assured, deceptively simple piece ... What gives Stone its force is the outraged humanity of its author, the dexterity of its language, and strength of its theatrical images. Bond is not afraid to explore the simple, and the result is a compulsive piece of theatre."—Evening Standard