Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Bond

Bond’s line reads like a brisk history of what drama has used as its alibi. First, “people and animals”: the old ritual stage where humans define themselves against the brute, the instinctive, the sacrificable. Then “people and the devil”: morality plays and melodramas that outsource conflict to a supernatural villain, letting society keep its hands clean. Both versions offer convenient scapegoats - nature or evil - so the audience can leave reassured that cruelty comes from somewhere else.

Bond’s pivot is the barb: “Now we need the theatre of people and people.” It’s not a kumbaya plea for human connection; it’s an indictment of how often theatre dodges real responsibility. If the devil is gone, if the animal mask no longer satisfies, what’s left is the uncomfortable modern truth Bond has spent a career staging: violence is social, structured, and enacted by ordinary citizens inside “normal” systems. His theatre wants antagonists who look like us because they are us - bureaucrats, parents, soldiers, neighbors - not horned abstractions.

The intent is aesthetic and political. Bond, writing in postwar Britain and steeped in arguments about state power, class, and the manufactured consent of “respectability,” pushes against entertainment that treats injustice as fate or pathology. The subtext is a demand for adulthood: stop mythologizing harm, stop casting it as metaphysics, start dramatizing complicity. “People and people” is also a challenge to audiences who consume suffering as spectacle; Bond wants theatre that returns the discomfort to its source, where choices are made and excused.