Edward Bond’s The War Plays: A Dystopian Reaction to Real-Life Violence

ASGRAD - Anglophone Studies Graduate Students Symposium, İzmir, Türkiye, 15 Aralık 2025 - 16 Ocak 2026, ss.24, (Özet Bildiri)

Being known as one of the prominent figures of political theatre in England,

Edward Bond reacted against the sources of ongoing political and social

problems in his plays. According to Bond, the major nuisance was violence

among people which was an outcome of the capitalist social structure. The

Western society in the 21st century, especially after the Second World War,

was highly shaped by capitalism, consumerism, and therefore, struggles

between the working class and the upper classes. Bond believed that the

structure of violence has changed together with the emergence of this new

“irrational” social organisation in which the gap between social classes has

widened in accordance with the growing demands of capitalism and

consumerism. As technology has been improved to meet the demands of this

society, the means and the scale of violence have changed, too. The

individual has become helpless against the continuing and growing violence.

In his dystopian trilogy, The War Plays, Bond portrayed how dangerous

capitalism and consumerism could be at the highest level for the individual.

Being set in a nuclear war period, the first play of the trilogy, Red, Black and

Ignorant, demonstrates the corruptness of the capitalist society and the

vulnerable position of the individual in it while the other two plays, The Tin

Can People and Great Peace illustrate a nuclear holocaust. Bond’s trilogy

presents social and political criticism in the form of dystopia, a genre that is

believed to be an efficacious means to criticise social and political issues.

Accordingly, this study aims to analyse Bond’s dystopian trilogy as a reaction

against the problems in social and political structures of the Western society

such as violence.