Have I None

In November 2011 there was a critically acclaimed revival of Saved directed by Sean Holmes at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London. This production was the prelude to a further short season of later plays at the Lyric, namely Have I None, The Under Room and Chair in April and May 2012. Also throughout 2012 there was an ongoing Bond 50 season of events including the performance and rehearsed readings of some of his plays written for Big Brum. There was also a major two-day conference and festival at Warwick University in November 2012 organised hy Professor Tony Howard and Chris Cooper. 

The second series Bond refers to as The Birmingham Plays. This generic term refers to all of Bond s plays written for Big Brum from 1995 through to the present. 1 focus my discussion of The Birmingham Plays on Chair, Have I None, The Under Room and Tune. Some of the plays originally commissioned by Big Brum were then also produced in Paris, such as Have I None. 

Have I None is the third play written in what Bond referred to originally as the Big Brum trilogy. The other two plays are At the Inland Sea (1995) and Eleven Vests (1997). 

Perhaps the crucial difference between At the Inland Sea and Eleven Vests and Have I None is the context in which setting, characterisation and narrative are delineated and explored. In Eleven Vests, Bond revisits familiar thematic territory in interrogating with its attendant criminality contrasts with the ideologically legitimised violence of soldiers murdering enemy hostages. 

What is remarkable about this play in terms of its creative inception is the defining meta-presence of Medea by Euripides. With its central preoccupation of the complex relationship between a mother and her children, it is also the inspiration for Bond s most recent work at the time of writing (March 2012) - Dea. Bond intended that There Will Be More, commissioned for the season of six plays at the Cock Tavern Theatre (Kilburn, London) in 2010, would represent the first in what would evolve eventually as a trilogy of plays under the one title. In the epigraph of the published edition of The Children, in conjunction with Have I None, Bond quotes as follows from Medea ... 

The Under Room is one of three later plays which Bond grouped into a trilogy he called The Chair Plays (with Chair and Have I None) for the short season of those three works at The Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, London in April/May 2012. The trilogy was divided into a double bill of Have I None and The Under Room, which opened the season, to be joined by Chair in the final part of the run. 

As with the other two plays that constitute what Bond called The Chair Plays, Have I None and The Under Room, the play s location is given as City 2077. Again, as with these plays, the environment of the play is a harsh, violent society in which an unnamed but authoritarian regime is in control. Its power is enforced by armed forces that patrol its troubled streets. In Chair the cast and setting of the play act as a disturbing microcosm of that wider dystopian reality. 

The old woman, reminiscent in some ways of the old woman in At the Inland Sea and Innocence, and indeed the unseen character in Have I None, epitomises a form of physical vulnerability. This vulnerability is expressed through her demeaning incontinence and the fact she has been robbed of speech. What hasn t yet departed or been snatched away through age or suffering is the desire to communicate. This desire and indeed need for utterance and more crucially communication with another human being is mirrored in Alice. 

PB In that play [Have I None] there are moments when it seems as if Edward Bond meets Ionesco, meets Feydeau. There are of course farcical moments interwoven with others of dark psychological... 

There is always something challenging and stimulating in every one of the plays. What you rightly called the collision of genres in Have I None was such a departure from At the Inland Sea and Eleven Vests. That was the newness in it that really challenged me and which I loved in a perverse sort of way. I also hated it in that initially I didn t know how to deal with it. 

Have I None, in The Chair Plays Have I None, The Under Room, Chair) (London Methuen Drama, 2012)... 

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