Collection of Plays: The Worlds

Overview
Edward Bond’s The Worlds (1995) gathers a set of later plays that map the moral and political terrain of the post–Cold War age. The title points to Bond’s central claim: people construct the worlds they inhabit, and those worlds in turn construct them. Across the collection, ordinary lives collide with systems of authority, scarcity, and surveillance, producing moments of stark decision in which a single gesture, giving shelter, refusing an order, telling the truth, can tilt an entire world toward care or cruelty.

Settings and situations
The plays range from stripped, near-future dystopias to recognizably contemporary rooms, streets, and wastelands. Bond places characters on edges, physical thresholds, city limits, borders, the outskirts of institutions, where the normal rules blur and people must improvise their humanity. A ruined landscape might be the aftermath of war or the psychic ruin of neglect; a bare flat can become a tribunal; a workplace conversation tips into an ethical test. Time is often unstable, as if the future were pressing through the present, so the smallest domestic choice feels politically charged.

Characters under pressure
Bond centers ordinary people, parents and children, lovers, workers, deserters, caretakers, whose lives are bent by social necessity. Their antagonists are not classic villains but functionaries: officers, managers, officials who speak in pragmatic clichés while enforcing brutality. Children and adolescents recur as witnesses and inheritors of damage, sometimes more able than adults to imagine a different order, sometimes forced into adult crimes. The plays often pair two figures, a host and a stranger, an official and a dissenter, a caregiver and a dependent, so that responsibility can be seen passing between them like a live wire.

Themes and moral arguments
The collection extends Bond’s lifelong argument that violence is produced by unjust social arrangements and then used to justify them. He examines the way public cruelty invades private tenderness: families are made to police each other; lovers adopt the rhetoric of the state; kindness becomes risky. Memory is fragile and contested, yet necessary: characters struggle to remember what a humane world feels like, and that half-memory is what keeps resistance possible. The plays reject consolation without denying hope; hope appears not as uplift but as a stubborn fidelity to simple acts of care performed under threat.

Dramaturgy and stagecraft
Bond’s scenes are spare, almost schematic: brief encounters accumulated into an argument. Language is plain, often clipped; when the idiom of policy and management enters, it turns grotesque, revealing the violence it conceals. Objects carry weight, a chair, a door, a coat, a loaf, because they mediate power and need. The most shocking moments are not decorative; they are ethical pivots designed to make the audience choose where to look and what to accept. Endings typically leave an image that does not resolve but obliges: a body unattended, a threshold un-crossed, a child looking outward.

Historical and cultural context
Written at a moment of triumphant market liberalism and fresh ethnic wars, the plays strip away the illusion that peace and prosperity have tamed political violence. The worlds onstage resemble the one outside the theatre: borders harden, public goods shrink, and institutions outsource their cruelty to procedure. Bond shows how quickly “normal” life becomes untenable when language, law, and care are hollowed out, and how new forms of solidarity must be invented from below.

Place in Bond’s oeuvre
The Worlds inherits the epic urgency of The War Plays and channels it into a leaner, more allegorical theatre. It marks Bond’s turn from large historical canvases toward austere parables and civic fables that can be staged with minimal means yet make maximal demands on spectators. The collection stands as a blueprint for his later work with small companies and young performers, and as a sustained demonstration of theatre as a public forum in which we test the worlds we are making.