Play: The Sea

Setting and Tone
Edward Bond’s The Sea unfolds in 1907 on a small East Anglian coastal town, its genteel Edwardian routines jarred by the raw, indifferent power of nature. The play is a tragicomedy: savage satire sits alongside elegy, farce collides with grief. The sea is both literal landscape and an impersonal force against which fragile human institutions, class hierarchy, religion, and civic order, are tested and found wanting.

Plot
A violent storm opens the play. Two young men are caught in the surf; one, Colin, drowns, while his companion, Willy Carson, stumbles ashore traumatized. The town’s social grande dame, Mrs Rafi, presides over the aftermath, fussing over propriety and reputation even as Colin’s fiancée, Rose, reels from shock. The supposed guardians of public order, the coastguard, the church, the shopkeepers, prove bumbling or self-serving when decisive action is demanded.

Hatch, the local draper, becomes the play’s volatile fuse. Humiliated by Mrs Rafi over credit and cloth, he channels class resentment into a paranoid cosmology: he decides the storm was a sign of alien invasion and that Willy is an intruder who must be eliminated. While Mrs Rafi rehearses an amateur pageant on the beach, bullying her chorus and co-opting the town’s grief into spectacle, Hatch gathers a knot of roughs and attempts to lynch the bewildered Willy. The assault is thwarted by Evens, an eccentric, half-drunken beach-dweller whose rough wisdom cuts through the town’s cant. A funeral for Colin exposes the church’s hollow consolations and the community’s appetite for display over compassion.

The plot resolves not with miracle or punishment but with choices. Mrs Rafi coolly reasserts control and plans the next social season as if calamity were merely an awkward interruption; Hatch, exposed and unhinged, is left isolated by the very community he sought to lead. Evens urges Willy to leave, to step beyond the stifling rituals of the town and accept responsibility in a larger, harsher world. Rose, pressed by Mrs Rafi to accept a prescribed future, resists the manipulation and contemplates escape on her own terms.

Characters
Mrs Rafi is the town’s imperious ringmistress, a comic monster whose taste for uplift masks a vigilant class tyranny. Hatch, the draper, is Bond’s portrait of petty authoritarianism: wounded pride metastasizes into conspiracy and violence. Evens is the outsider-sage, abrasive yet humane, whose blunt atheism clears room for ethical action. Willy Carson is the bewildered survivor whose shock becomes a crucible for adulthood, and Rose, grieving and lucid, tests the limits of the life allotted to her by class and custom.

Themes and Imagery
Bond counterpoints elemental nature with brittle social forms: the storm exposes how easily manners crack under pressure. The play dismantles Edwardian authority, church, civic ceremony, and the cult of respectability, revealing institutions that sanctify hierarchy rather than protect the vulnerable. Violence is shown as a social contagion: Hatch’s fantasies need only a nudge from humiliation and complicity to become attempted murder. Against this, Bond places a stubborn humanism. Evens’ tough counsel rejects superstition and deference; meaning is not bestowed from above but made through responsibility, solidarity, and the courage to change one’s conditions. The sea, recurrently present, is not moral but indifferent; its vastness throws human cruelty and kindness into stark relief.

Ending
The final moments juxtapose continuity and possibility. Mrs Rafi tidies catastrophe into etiquette and pageant, the town resumes its rhythms, and the sea keeps rolling. Willy, steadied by Evens, chooses departure; Rose, no longer compliant, looks toward a life beyond the parish gaze. Bond leaves the shoreline as a threshold: behind it, the comforts of order that enable cruelty; ahead, an uncertain world where necessity, not providence, demands that people invent their own justice.