Edward Bond: *Lear* (1971)
*Lear* is a play by English dramatist Edward Bond, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1971. Bond explicitly rewrites and responds to Shakespeare's *King Lear*, but with radical ideological differences. While Shakespeare's tragedy explores individual suffering and redemption through suffering, Bond's *Lear* is a brutal Marxist-feminist critique of political power, state violence, and the myth that suffering teaches wisdom.
**Plot Summary**
Bond's Lear is not a foolish old man who divides his kingdom. Instead, he is a tyrannical ruler obsessed with building a wall to protect his kingdom from imaginary enemies. His daughters, Bodice and Fontanelle (analogous to Goneril and Regan), are not ungrateful children but ruthless power-seekers who overthrow him, imprison him, and continue the same cycle of violence. Lear escapes, wanders through a devastated landscape, and witnesses the horrors of state terror: torture, execution, starvation, and the brutal suppression of a rebellion led by a character named Cordelia (here a revolutionary activist, not a loving daughter). In the second half, Lear undergoes a painful journey not toward spiritual transcendence but toward political clarity. He realizes that his wall—and all walls built by authority—serve only to protect power from the people. He dismantles the wall publicly. In the final scene, as he is shot dead by soldiers, Lear concludes not with redemption but with a stark materialist insight: "Look at that wall... They're still building it."
**Major Themes**
- **Violence of the State:** Bond shows that tyranny does not result from individual evil but from institutional power. Lear, Bodice, Fontanelle, and the soldiers are all trapped in a system that requires violence to maintain itself.
- **Anti-Aristotelian Tragedy:** Unlike Shakespeare, Bond refuses catharsis. The audience should not pity Lear but understand that his suffering was avoidable—the product of political choices, not cosmic fate.
- **The Myth of Learning through Suffering:** Bond explicitly attacks the idea that suffering ennobles. Lear learns only that he was wrong—and that knowledge comes too late to undo the harm he caused.
**Legacy**
*Lear* remains Bond's most famous play, though it divided critics for its unrelenting violence and didacticism. It is a landmark of **epic theatre** in the Brechtian tradition: cold, analytical, and designed to provoke political thought rather than emotional identification. It continues to be revived for its fierce moral urgency.