Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Bond

Bond frames playwriting as a form of self-defense, not self-branding. The provocation is in the refusal of the obvious motive: money isn’t just dismissed, it’s treated as an irrelevant category next to sanity. For a playwright whose work is famously uncompromising about violence, class power, and institutional cruelty, that contrast matters. He’s not claiming art as luxury; he’s claiming it as a pressure valve in a world that routinely denies coherence.

The subtext is blunt: the world, as lived, does not naturally arrive arranged into meaning. “Rational” here isn’t tidy logic or polite realism. It’s an ethical insistence that events have causes and structures - and that those structures can be named. Bond’s plays often stage moments where social systems corner people into brutality. Writing becomes a way to take the fog of experience - fear, rage, helplessness - and give it a shape you can argue with. The stage turns private disturbance into public inquiry.

Context sharpens the intent. Bond emerged in postwar Britain, when the promise of welfare-state stability sat uneasily beside Cold War dread, austerity, and a culture that preferred not to look too closely at what violence does to ordinary lives. His line reads like a rebuke to a theatre economy that demands entertainment or uplift: if the world is irrational, comforting stories are just another form of denial. The play, for Bond, is a tool for staying human - a disciplined way to keep thinking when reality keeps trying to make thinking feel pointless.