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The Segal Center celebrated the legacy of iconic and controversial British playwright, Edward Bond, who passed away last year. The Segal Center presented a reading of Bond’s unproduced final play, The Shoe Thief, presented in collaboration with Irondale Ensemble Project.
The reading is followed by a discussion with experts on Bond and his work, including professor Art Borreca, moderated by Frank Hentschker.
Edward Bond was a working-class English playwright born in 1934 who left state education at age fifteen to work in factories and offices. Among his formative experiences was being sent away as a child from his London home to avoid German bombing, only to return to a London being destroyed by Hitler's V1 and V2 missiles. His drama has been performed on every continent, starting in 1963 in London and continuing to the present day. Working for and with young people, both as citizens and artists, has always been a special site of activity for Bond. All his work, whether plays, poetry, or theoretical writing about drama, addresses the most urgent questions about the social and political crises faced by the human species.
Irondale Ensemble Project exists at the intersection of art, education, community engagement, and social justice. We develop long-term artistic collaborations to create theatre that expands the boundaries of the art form and helps audiences and artists make sense of today’s world.
Art Borreca is associate professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa, where he serves as co-head of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop (MFA Programs in Playwriting and Dramaturgy) and artistic director of the Iowa New Play Festival. During Art’s tenure, alumni of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop have included David Adjmi, Kirsten Greenidge, Samuel D. Hunter, Tony Meneses, Jen Silverman, Andrew Saito, Basil Kreimendahl, Bonnie Metzgar, Eric Holmes, and Marisela Treviño Orta, among others. Art has worked as a dramaturg with Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Theodora Skipitares, Naomi Wallace, Lisa Schlesinger, David Gothard, and others in such venues as the Yale Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, LaMama ETC, Oxford Stage Company, and Theatre Project Tokyo. His writing has appeared in TDR and Modern Drama, and in the collections Dramaturgy in American Theatre, Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, and Embodied Dialogues: The Theatre of Naomi Wallace. He was a consulting editor on The Norton Anthology of Drama.
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In my talk, I was in error about Sir John Gielgud testifying on behalf of the Royal Court in its legal battle with the Lord Chamberlain.
Sir John did a number of things that contested Britain's restrictive social mores. After being arrested for "cottaging" in the early 1950s, he resisted the impulse to withdraw from public view, appearing on stage to standing ovations. In the early 1970s, he performed in several socially frank plays at the Royal Court, including Bingo, David Storey's Home, and Charles Wood's Veterans, in which he was the first actor, it is said, to utter the word "F***" on the English stage. In 1976, he wrote an openly gay screenplay for a short film, TROUSER BAR, which did not get made in his time but which was recently completed by David McGillivray (to the chagrin of the Gielgud Charitable Trust).
Sir John was generally less public about his political views or sexual identity than testimony in a censorship trial would have required. It was Sir Laurence Oliver who testified on behalf of the Royal Court, calling Bond's Saved "a play for grown-ups."