"Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society"

Art, for Edward Bond, is not a realm of escape but a disciplined investigation. “Close scrutiny” suggests the artist’s eye pressed like a lens against the fabric of daily life, attending to detail, cause, and consequence. The stage becomes a laboratory in which social forces are tested and revealed, not a decorative screen for fantasies. Such scrutiny rejects romantic gloss and demands accuracy about how people live, hurt, compromise, and collude.

The logical pivot is the therefore. If art’s task is inquiry, then its materials must be verifiable realities. Bond’s commitment to staging only what happens in society is an ethical stance: representation should be accountable to the world that produces it. This does not confine the artist to documentary literalism; rather, it legitimizes selection, compression, and pattern-finding that expose structures beneath events. When violence, deprivation, or institutional cruelty appear in his plays, they do so not for shock’s sake but because they are endemic features of the social order and must be analyzed in public.

Such an approach redefines the audience’s role. Recognition is the trigger: spectators should see their own society reframed, its normalities estranged just enough to become legible. Discomfort is not a failure of art but a sign that scrutiny has reached a nerve. The stage functions as a civic forum where hidden causes are brought to light, where private suffering is linked to public arrangements, and where responsibility can be named without euphemism.

Imagination still matters, but as a tool for precision, not evasion. Invention serves to heighten clarity, to connect dots that daily habit keeps apart. The measure of success is whether what is shown resonates with what people know to be true, and whether that recognition opens a path to change. By insisting on reality as art’s ground, Bond claims both moral seriousness and practical purpose: to make the world intelligible enough that it can be altered.