Play: Lear

Overview

Edward Bond's Lear (1971) is a radical reimagining of Shakespeare's tragedy, recast as a brutal political fable about tyranny, revolution, and the self-perpetuating machinery of state violence. The play replaces dynastic romance with a stark analysis of power, using a vast defensive wall as its central metaphor for oppression, paranoia, and the illusions authority creates to justify cruelty. Bond strips away sentiment to confront how societies teach people to harm one another, and how moral insight, when it comes, arrives too late to halt the cycle.

Plot

Lear rules a harsh kingdom obsessed with building a wall to keep out enemies. Convinced that danger lurks everywhere, he orders executions on flimsy pretexts and treats dissent as treason. His daughters, Bodice and Fontanelle, ally themselves with powerful warlords and stage a coup. In the struggle, loyal servants are captured and mutilated, Warrington has his tongue cut out, and Lear is overthrown, imprisoned, and eventually blinded by the new regime. The literal loss of sight becomes the beginning of Lear's moral awakening.

Escaping his captors, Lear is sheltered by the Gravedigger's Boy, a peasant who lives simply with his young wife by a stream. Their fragile haven is destroyed when soldiers arrive, kill the Boy, and brutalize his wife. From this devastation, a new leader emerges: the widow, later called Cordelia, who organizes the rebels and topples Bodice and Fontanelle. The daughters die violently, Fontanelle's body is dissected onstage, her exposed brain interrogated as if it might yield political truths, yet the revolution soon hardens into another apparatus of terror.

Cordelia's government institutionalizes purges and extends the wall. Lear, now a blind old man, is alternately exploited and caged. Haunted by the ghost of a worker he once condemned and by memories of his own cruelty, he comes to see the wall as both physical fortification and moral blindness. He pleads for reconciliation and responsibility, arguing that people are made cruel by the systems that govern them, and that only dismantling those structures can break the pattern.

In the final movement, Lear tries to tear down the wall himself, clawing at its foundations. Soldiers receive orders to stop him; a young conscript hesitates, then obeys. Lear is shot as he works, dying with a lucid understanding of the disaster he helped create. The wall remains, the system intact, even as individual leaders fall.

Characters and relationships

Lear begins as an authoritarian who believes security requires absolute control. Suffering strips him of power and ideology, turning him into a witness who understands how fear breeds violence. Bodice and Fontanelle are heirs to his brutality, reshaping it through marriage and opportunism before becoming its victims. Warrington embodies loyalty crushed by the state. The Gravedigger's Boy offers a fleeting vision of human decency outside power. Cordelia, the Boy's widow, transforms from victim to insurgent to ruler, tracing the tragic arc by which the oppressed replicate the forms of their oppression.

Themes

The wall images the fabrication of enemies, the manipulation of borders, and the way institutions normalize harm. Blindness and seeing move from metaphor to flesh, linking insight to suffering. Bond probes complicity: no one stands outside the system that educates people to violence. Revolution promises renewal but, without structural change, reproduces the same coercive logic. Language is policed and maimed, tongues are cut out, while bodies become the sites where power writes its lessons.

Style and staging

Bond uses stark, Brechtian methods, abrupt scenes, direct address, and shocking violence to sabotage comfort and sentiment. The wall dominates the stage as both set and thesis. Mutilations, the eye-blinding machine, and Fontanelle's autopsy confront the audience with the material cost of authority. The tone oscillates between bleak comedy and tragedy, driving toward a final image of a man trying to unmake what he built, and a society unwilling to let him.