Lear (Broché)

Edward Bond's version of Lear's story embraces myth, superstition and reality to reveal the endemic violence of a rancorous society. He exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this false morality as a source of the aggressive tension which may ultimately destroy that society. In a play wherein blindness becomes a dramatic metaphor for insight, Bond warns that 'it is so easy to subordinate justice to power, but when this happens power takes on the dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is realy changed'.