Narrow Road to the Deep North

These sentiments throw interesting light upon the plays of what Bond has called his Second Series The Fool The Bundle, or. New Narrow Road to the Deep North (performed and published in 1978) The Woman Scenes of War and Freedom (performed in 1978, published in 1979) The Worlds (performed in 1979, published in 1980) and Restoration (performed and published in 1981). In their different ways, these plays all seek to propose answers, no matter how provisional and problematic, to the crucial political and social issues facing us and our society in the late twentieth century. The Bundle is a reworking of Narrow Road to the Deep North, offering an extension of its allegorical structure. As Bond explained in The Guardian on 13 January 1978 The people in The Bundle all live by a river. Directly or indirectly they all live from it. From time to time it floods and destroys them. If, as the play invites, you substitute factories and offices - all industrialism - for the river, then my purpose is plain (Bond qtd in Roberts, 1985, p. 43). 

Alice knows and fears that the consequences of trying to act upon a human imperative or compassion and justice will bring the authorities to their door. She then discloses the narrative of how she came to find Billy as a baby and rescue him in a manner that is reminiscent of two of Bond s earlier plays Narrow Road to the Deep North and its later sister piece The Bundle. There are also distant echoes of Brecht s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Alice describes how she had heard a cry from a box left in an empty street save for an unknown woman watching the scene from the shadows ... 

Plays 2 (Lear, The Sea, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Black Mass,... 

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