Play: Early Morning

Overview
Edward Bond’s Early Morning (1968) is a savage, dreamlike satire that explodes the myth of a virtuous Victorian age. It reimagines Queen Victoria’s court as a grotesque circus in which sentimentality and “decency” mask systemic violence. Written at the end of the Lord Chamberlain’s regime of stage censorship, the play became notorious for its blasphemous and politically caustic images, including a lesbian affair for Queen Victoria and scenes of cannibalism. Bond’s target is not individuals but the social machinery of empire: the language of moral order that licenses brutality at home and abroad.

Plot
The play unfolds in an alternate, hallucinatory Victorian England, cutting between the palace and a far-off imperial campaign. At court, Queen Victoria presides with absurd pomposity while indulging an intimate relationship with Florence Nightingale. Ritual and decorum flourish even as the state corrodes. Victoria’s sons are conjoined twins, two princes who share a body but not a conscience, turning dynastic continuity into a living metaphor for political entrapment. Their desires and rivalries become public crises because in a world founded on spectacle, private life is administered like policy.

Meanwhile, the imperial war grinds on with pointless cruelty. Soldiers, starved and abandoned by a vainglorious command, drift toward mutiny and cannibalism, eating to survive while their superiors speak of honor. Reports of atrocities arrive at the palace as if they were items on a menu. Administrators contrive legal fictions to justify slaughter and to reassure the public that decency is being upheld.

The court’s solution to scandal is the ceremonial punishment of one of the conjoined princes. The execution is staged as a moral lesson, but because the twins share a body, killing one leaves the survivor shackled to a corpse. He must drag his dead brother, a grotesque pageant of state justice that the palace tries to spin as edifying. Florence Nightingale oscillates between nurse, lover, and bureaucrat, tending to the mess while helping to preserve the spectacle. The Queen’s household continues with dinners, levees, and lectures on propriety, even as the battlefield horror penetrates the drawing room. Acts of kindness are instrumentalized; grief is stylized; violence is administrative.

As the action accelerates, reality loosens. Characters slip into nightmare logic, identities blur, and the language of respectability becomes gibberish. Figures from the court and the army cross and recross each other’s worlds until there is no clear boundary between home and front. The final images are apocalyptic: the court’s pageantry collapses into wreckage, bodies accumulate, and the state’s rituals cannot conceal the void they were designed to fill. Authority remains self-assured to the last breath, insisting that the ruin is order.

Characters and dynamics
Queen Victoria is rendered as a comic tyrant whose tenderness curdles into coercion. Florence Nightingale, stripped of hagiography, is both caretaker and collaborator, sharpening the play’s argument that reform can be drafted into the service of repression. The conjoined princes literalize the impossibility of separating public duty from private life in a regime that uses bodies as symbols. Offstage ministers and officers haunt the action as mouthpieces of policy, their platitudes ricocheting through scenes of deprivation and decay.

Themes and tone
Early Morning fuses black farce with political allegory. Its central collisions, charity and violence, pageant and corpse, intimacy and surveillance, expose how Victorian morality laundered power. Cannibalism works as a running emblem for a society that survives by consuming its own. The conjoined twins compress the contradictions of lineage, property, and personhood into a single grotesque image. Bond’s language is clipped, ceremonially polite, and then suddenly brutal, mirroring institutions that speak softly while they break bones.

Staging and impact
Episodic, anti-naturalistic scenes and shock images give directors an arsenal of bold stage pictures, from court rituals that turn into butchery to the prince hauling his dead brother like a state secret. Denied a license before the abolition of censorship in 1968, the play’s controversy underscored Bond’s argument: that respectable society depends on violence and must deny the fact to look at itself.