(Benedict Nightingale’s article appeared in the Times of London, 4/23.)

Great moments in theatre: Saved

The writer Edward Bond was stunned by the critical reception of a play he called “almost irresponsibly optimistic”

A sadly familiar sign of the arrival in Britain of an original and important dramatist is a critical mauling. It happened to Ibsen, to Beckett, even to Chekhov. It happened to Sarah Kane, though the importance of her debut play, Blasted, is still debated. It certainly happened to Edward Bond, with almost every reviewer wincing in disgust from Saved, a play in which a band of thugs smeared a baby with its own excrement and then stoned it to death in the pram its mother had abandoned in a London park.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article7105298.ece

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