Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Friday, 12 December 2008

Following Up

Bond is back
(Photo: Eamonn McCabe)

What a difference a year makes. I wrote last November about the lack of productions in the English-language theatre of plays by English-language dramatists like Edward Bond, and now Bond is all over the place; at least, he's all over the Internet. Helen Shaw provides a short interview with Edward Bond at Time Out New York this week (Bond's Chair, directed by Robert Woodruff, runs at Theatre for a New Audience through the end of December); this interview leads to Garrett Eisler's puckish comment at Playgoer, which followed upon my own brief mention of Bond earlier this week. And now, with my caption to the photo above, we can finally retire all of the easy puns and James Bond references (Time Out New York: "His word is Bond"; Playgoer: "Bond. Edward Bond") and, resting assured in our popcult literacy, get back to work.

At the Guardian today, the Village Voice's Alexis Soloski writes about Christopher Shinn's recent essay in the Index on Censorship, which I first wrote about on Wednesday 3 December; Shinn responds to Soloski in the comments section at the Guardian. As Shinn points out there, he's not doubting the claim that writers are writing political plays in violent opposition to the current regime, only that there are narrow limits to the content of this opposition and these plays, and that these limits are by and large driven by the fears of dramatists losing stages for their work and the fears of these stages losing their subscribers and funders. My own thoughts can be read in the link to my own post earlier in this paragraph.

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Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum II (2008-2009)
Critique of Tragedy (2010-continuing)

Notes
Howard Barker 1
Howard Barker 2
Samuel Beckett 1
Samuel Beckett 2
Bertolt Brecht
Richard Foreman 1
Richard Foreman 2
Je Suis Sang
Sarah Kane
Music
Marilyn Nonken
Saint Oedipus

Contact
geh@panix.com