The Under Room

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. 

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. 

The Under Room is set, like its two sister plays, in a foreseeable but futuristic Britain of 2077. The play has the one setting of a basement... 

The Dummy is, in a complex psycho-dramatic equivalence, a Pentheus to Joan s proto-Agaue. Similarly a savage Eucharistic rite of body, blood and dismemberment is enacted in the under room her... 

In his essay Freedom and Drama, published along with The Under Room and the four other plays comprising Plays 8, Bond writes ... 

In the penultimate scene of the play, scene 8, which follows the murder of the Dummy, the character of Jack appears again, ffe surveys the devastation of the under room and reflects upon its causes and implications. Jack is an intriguing character who in some explicit sense embodies the violence of the society in which he seeks to survive. His narrative and plot function in the play centre upon his role as a cynically pragmatic fixer. He has witnessed the Dummy Actor shoplooting in the incident prior to the start of the play - the act which has catapulted him into Joan s flat and... 

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. 

CC I ve already referred to the Dummy Actor and the Dummy in The Under Room, a tremendous challenge but great to work on. Then Tune, which you saw of course, the sheer joy of working on that with... 

Plays 8 (Bom, People, Chair, Existence, The Under Room) (London ... 

Richard Holmes as Jack and Adam Bethlenfalvy as the Dummy Actor, The Under Room, Big Brum Theatre,... 

Formal acknowledgements to the following for permission to use production photographs of Bond s plays Simon Kane (Saved), Chris Cooper (The Under Room, At the Inland Sea, The Balancing Act) and Corin Evans Pritchard (The Children). 

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

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