The Fool | |
---|---|
Written by | Edward Bond |
Date premiered | 18 November 1975 |
Place premiered | Royal Court Theatre, London |
Original language | English |
The Fool: Scenes of Bread and Love is a play by the English playwright Edward Bond. [1] It traces the life of the poet John Clare against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, from his roots in rural East Anglia via literary success in London to his final years in a lunatic asylum. [2] [3] The play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1975, in a production directed by Peter Gill and featuring a cast including Tom Courtenay, David Troughton and Nigel Terry among others. [4]
After a 35-year hiatus, The Fool was revived in the UK in late 2010 as part of the six-play Edward Bond Season at the Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn, London. [5] Bond himself directed the production, with Ben Crispin playing the role of John Clare. [6] It is one of the highly regarded works in Bond's output.
The Spectator 's Kenneth Hurren criticized the play and the performance after the Royal Court Theatre premiere, arguing that the work consists of two different plays that "do not so much blend with as disappear into each other" and saying that Courtenay "has a hard time with Clare". [7]
In a 2001 article for The New York Times , Benedict Nightingale described The Fool as "moving". [8] In 2006, Mark Ravenhill praised the boxing match as one of Bond's "brilliant images". [9] Elizabeth Davis of Kilburn Times wrote, after seeing the 2010 performance directed by Bond, that "the play has powerful moments but the production was overly long (at 2hr 45mins) and, at times, as po-faced as the pompous vicar. Nevertheless, Bond, as ever, creates a memorable and thought-provoking evening." [10] In the same year, Ravenhill lauded the play as a "brilliant [...] landmark" work and wrote, "There is no play that more acutely captures the experience of being a writer who is happily snatched up by London literary circles and then just as hastily dispatched". [11]
Michael Billington of The Guardian called The Fool "a fine play" in a 2010 review of a different play. [12] Lyn Gardner described it as "a very fine play about Clare" in the same paper. [13] Playwright Nicholas Wright referred to it as a "great play". [14] Pamela McCallum wrote in 2016 that the play "represents a high point of post-war British drama and perhaps can be taken as a site of division between generations in theatre. The following generation—Churchill, Ravenhill, Kane, and Butterworth—foreground, in very different ways, the psychological distortions and devastating brutalities of the contemporary world". [15]
The Fool won Best Play of 1976 in the Plays and Players London Critics Award. [16]
Sarah Kane was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action.
Mark Little is an Australian actor, television presenter, comedian and screen/stage writer. He is known for portraying the role of Joe Mangel from 1988-1991, 2005 and 2022 on the Australian soap opera Neighbours.
In-yer-face theatre is a term used to describe a confrontational style and sensibility of drama that emerged in Great Britain in the 1990s. This term was borrowed by British theatre critic Aleks Sierz as the title of his book, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, first published by Faber and Faber in March 2001.
The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a non-commercial West End theatre in Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England. In 1956 it was acquired by and remains the home of the English Stage Company, which is known for its contributions to contemporary theatre and won the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities in 1999.
Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1975), Restoration (1981), and the War trilogy (1985). Bond is broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.
Mark Ravenhill is an English playwright, actor and journalist.
The Sea is a 1973 play by Edward Bond. It is a comedy set in a small seaside village in rural East Anglia during the Edwardian period and draws from some of the themes of Shakespeare's The Tempest. It was well-received by critics.
Narrow Road to the Deep North is a 1968 satirical play on the British Empire by the English playwright Edward Bond.
The King's Head Theatre, founded in 1970 by Dan Crawford, is an off-West End venue in London. It is the oldest operating pub theatre in the UK. In 2021, Mark Ravenhill became Artistic Director and the theatre focusses on producing LGBTQ+ work, work that is joyful, irreverent, colourful and queer.
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is a 1973 play by English playwright Edward Bond. It depicts an ageing William Shakespeare at his Warwickshire home in 1615 and 1616, suffering pangs of conscience in part because he signed a contract which protected his landholdings, on the condition that he would not interfere with an enclosure of common lands that would hurt the local peasant farmers. Although the play is fictional, this contract has a factual basis. Bingo is a political drama heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Epic theatre. Some have praised Bond's portrayal of Shakespeare while others have criticized it.
The Apathists were a collective of British playwrights who staged plays and happenings in London between March 2006 and March 2007. The events generated a cult following on the London theatre scene. The collective had a festival of their work at the Union Theatre produced by David Luff and were involved in the 2006 Latitude Festival, but their work mainly centred on monthly nights at Theatre503, formerly the Latchmere Theatre.
The Cock Tavern Theatre was a pub theatre located in Kilburn in the north-west of London. The venue specialised in new works and critical revivals. Resident companies Good Night Out Presents and OperaUpClose were also based at the venue. It shut in 2011, due to health and safety problems regarding the Victorian staircases that serviced the theatre.
Adam Spreadbury-Maher is an Australian/Irish theatre artistic director, producer and writer. He is the founding artistic director of the Cock Tavern Theatre, OperaUpClose and The Hope Theatre, and was artistic director of the Kings Hesd until 2021 King's Head Theatre. Spreadbury-Maher introduced the first unionised pay agreement for actors in a pub-theatre in 2011, and in 2017 introduced the first fringe creative pay agreement and gender policy.
Good Night Out Presents is one of the resident theatre companies at The Cock Tavern Theatre in London.
OperaUpClose is a national touring opera company, led by Artistic Director Flora McIntosh, The company was founded in 2009 to produce its début production, Robin Norton-Hale's Olivier Award-winning adaptation of Puccini's La bohème at The Cock Tavern Theatre.
John Boswall was a British actor known for playing Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 and Wyvern in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Michael Elliott, OBE was an English theatre and television director. He was a founding director of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.
Clare Lizzimore is a British theatre director and writer. Her production of Bull by Mike Bartlett, won 'Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre' at the 2015 Olivier Awards. Lizzimore has been resident director at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, and staff director at the Royal National Theatre.
Restoration is a 1981 play by English dramatist Edward Bond that has been described as "simultaneously a Restoration comedy, a parody of Restoration comedies, and a dissection of class privilege in the Restoration era." It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on 22 July 1981 with the master, his wife, his servant Bob, and Bob's wife played by Simon Callow, Irene Handl, Philip Davis, and Debby Bishop, respectively.