Politics & Power Quote by Edward Bond

Bond is pushing back against the lazy fantasy that a stage can substitute for a leaflet. “At the moment” is the tell: he’s speaking from inside a crisis - social, moral, perhaps institutional - where artists get pressed into service as publicists for the correct cause. His refusal isn’t apolitical; it’s a demand for higher stakes than slogan-making. Political propaganda, he implies, flatters the audience into thinking recognition equals action. It offers the comforting shape of certainty: villains, heroes, a takeaway. That’s “simplistic” not because politics is beneath art, but because simplification is a kind of lie - and theatre, for Bond, is where lies become visible.

The more provocative move is the collective “we.” Bond doesn’t exempt playwrights, critics, or audiences from confusion. Theatre becomes less a megaphone than a diagnostic tool: a place to test motives, reveal the hidden machinery of violence and compliance, and show how “our situation” is reproduced in intimate decisions. The subtext is that propaganda arrives after understanding; it’s what institutions do once they’ve decided what reality is. Bond’s theatre wants to catch reality while it’s still unstable, before ideology seals it.

Context matters: Bond emerges from postwar Britain, writing in the long shadow of fascism, nuclear anxiety, class antagonism, and state authority. His plays don’t avoid politics; they refuse the politics of reassurance. He’s arguing for theatre as inquiry under pressure - a space where the audience can’t outsource its moral labor to a message, because the message hasn’t earned the right to exist yet.