Your Morality is Violence Politicising the Past

Violence shapes and obsesses our society and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence. (Bond, 1978, p. 3) 

Lear is a play about revolution. It is also a play about violence. Though the two themes are complementary they are not synonymous, and it may be that the excessive amount of realistic physical violence in this play - far more than in any of Bond s previous dramas [...] considerably alienated reviewers and public alike when the play was first performed. (Hirst, 1985, p. 132) 

Brechtian dramaturgy, talking instead in terms of his concept of Rational Theatre.  

For Bond at this period the notion of the rational arguably carried a clear connotation of his then Marxist interpretation of society, culture, economy and history  

An artist cannot create art, cannot demonstrate his objective truth, in the service of reaction or fascism because art is not merely the discovery of new truth or new aspects of old truth - but also of the human need for the rational [...] Art isn t the discovery of particular truths in the way science is it also demonstrates the practical working out of the human need for truth. (Bond, 1978, p. xv) 

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