aigari@alumni.uv.es
EDWARD BOND Saved
A play first presented privately in November 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre. It is a contemporary play in thirteen scenes and is written in prose.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
PAM: She is quite a miserable person who lives
with her two parents in a flat in South London. She is young and unconsiderate
and does not behave very consciously.
FRED: A young boy. He used to go out with Pam.
He is senseless, cruel and behaves like a hooligan.
LEN: He is a handsome good lad who has just
moved to live in Pam’s house. He and Pam will have a kind of relationship.
PLOT: It is a play set amongst the poor working class of
the South side of London in the sixties. Its subject is the cultural poverty
and frustration of a generation of young people on the dole and living on
council estates. A dreary family: a mother and father and their daughter, Pam.
Pam is pregnant by a local boy named Fred. To give some money to the family,
father Harry and mother Mary let out one of their rooms to a handsome young man
named Len. One day Len and Pam are having sex on the family couch as Harry
interrupts and sees them. Afterwards, Pam has her unwanted baby. We don't really
know whose child is it even though Pam leaves the baby in the unwilling care
of her ex-boyfriend Fred. Then he and his hooligan-like friends proceed to
taunt, torture, and eventually stone the baby to death.
SPACE: The play is represented in different spaces. We can
see for example a public garden, a living room, a bed room, the prison, ...
Most of the spaces where the play is developed are closed places, and the
majority of them show some darkness on the atmosphere.
TIME: Play represents at least some months because Pam
gets pregnant and there are lots of facts to happen just in few days.
LITERARY RESOURCES: We can not see clearly any literary
resources like metaphors, comparisons... but we can notice that specially in
abreviations there is used a special English (ere’s, aint...). Appart
from this, all the characters use a really simple language which can be understood
by everybody easily.
PERSONAL OPINION: A hard and unforgettable play to read. Some even
would say this play to be partly responsible for the end of censorship in
England. This play, again deals with the violence of life and how extreme
situations get people to do really awful things. It has been really shocking to
imagine it by reading and would even be more impressing to watch it
represented. It would be fair to say that the author tries to bring to light
the darkest parts of the human beings. This is, the parts that just could come
out of a human being when it has lost all its humanity, enough to have fun
while stoning a little baby. There could be said, as well, that he tried to
bring to the light the kind of life in the London suburbs and the lack of
minimal values that that margination carries to the ones who live there. A life
in extreme poverty and feeling desperate and forgot, not being worried about.
It is interesting to read the play, even more to realise it was written almost
half a century ago, even though, again, it is hard and explicitely violent
play.