Power in Edward Bond's The Chair Plays

Abstract

Edward Bond is among the original playwrights that guided contemporary English theatre through the rationalist theatre he developed, the subjects tackled, the characters in his plays, and who affected the succeeding playwrights most of all. Bond, who penned more than fifty works between his first play The Pope's Wedding (1962) and his last play Dea (2016), expressed violence tirelessly, which he regards as the biggest problem of contemporary societies. The Chair Plays, consisting of the plays titled The Under Room, Chair, and Have I None, are about the problem of power. The Chair Plays take place in 2077, and the social environment in which people under the pressure of totalitarian state apparatus are ruled unilaterally, is presented to audience through a biopolitical reality that surrounds them. In the Chair Plays, individuals who constitute the next human generations are shown in such a captive situation that they cannot have a say over their lives. Bond, who draws a very pessimistic picture provides a little light of optimism and tries to show the audience the last exit before the bridge by making them think about what might happen in 2077. The aim of this study is to reveal the totalitarian social system that guides Edward Bond's The Chair Plays, and to uncover the chaos environment created by the biopolitical power mechanisms in which the author highlights the dystopian aspects and the ways to escape from it. In this context, the concept of biopolitics is discussed in mediation of Michel Foucault's and Zygmunt Bauman's views, and the escape area that Edward Bond weaves with pessimism is attempted to be captured.