Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Bond

Truth in the theater isn’t a fact to be reported; it’s a charge to be smuggled past the audience’s defenses. Edward Bond’s line has the cool severity of a playwright who thinks drama is a civic instrument, not a decorative art. “Got to” is the tell: this isn’t a preference, it’s a requirement. If truth arrives looking like a sermon, it won’t land as truth at all. It will register as propaganda, or worse, as self-congratulation.

Bond is writing against a cozy idea of realism where “truth” equals accurate furniture, convincing accents, and dialogue that sounds like eavesdropping. His point is harsher: the stage is an engine of illusion, so truth must negotiate with artifice. Plausibility is the audience’s admission ticket. They need a route into belief - emotional, psychological, social - before they can confront what the play is actually indicting.

The subtext is political. Bond’s work, shaped by postwar Britain and a suspicion of respectable violence (state, family, class), often argues that society manufactures cruelty and calls it normal. To expose that, theater can’t just display brutality; it has to make the chain of causes feel inevitable enough that viewers recognize their own world in it. “Plausible” doesn’t mean “comfortable.” It means “recognizable,” the kind of recognition that turns spectators into witnesses.

So the intent isn’t to soften truth, but to weaponize it: truth as something that persuades because it feels like life, then stings because it’s been life all along.