Bond was broadly considered among the major living dramatists[1][2] but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.

In June 1958, after submitting two plays to the Royal Court Theatre (The Fiery Tree and Klaxon in Atreus' Place, which Bond kept unpublished in perpetuity) he was invited to join its newly formed writers' group.

[10][11] After three years studying with writers his age but already well-known (like John Arden, Arnold Wesker, and Ann Jellicoe), Bond had his first real play, The Pope's Wedding, staged as a Sunday night "performance without décor" at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962.

[28] In 1969, when the Royal Court was finally able to perform Bond's work legally, it put on and toured the three plays in Europe, winning the Belgrade International Theatre Festival prize.

While Bond's work remained banned for performance in Britain, Saved became the greatest international success of its time with more than thirty different productions around the world between 1966 and 1969, often by notorious directors such as Peter Stein in Germany or Claude Régy in France.

"[35] The subdued Edwardian-set comedy The Sea (1973) shows a seaside community on England's East Coast a few years before World War I, dominated by a dictatorial woman and overwhelmed by the drowning of one of its young citizens.

For example, in 1976 he wrote, on one hand Stone and A-A-America (pronounced as a sneeze), two agit-prop-style plays, respectively for Gay Sweatshop and the Almost Free Theatre and, on the other, an adaptation of Webster's The White Devil for Michael Lindsay-Hogg to re-open the Old Vic and a libretto for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to open at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden: We Come to the River.

Beginning with Bingo in 1976, the RSC revived and toured his plays regularly until the early 1990s, and Bond, though often disagreeing with the aesthetic choices of its productions[39] or protesting at not being consulted sufficiently, recognized the genuine support the company gave to his work.

Comparable to Lear, it shows the fight of the decayed Trojan queen, Hecuba, against the Athenian empire, succeeding only when she abandons the aristocracy and the interests of the state to physically meet the proletariat and join the people's cause.

In 1977, Bond accepted an honorary doctorate in letters from Yale University (although, thirty years previously, he had not been allowed to sit for his eleven-plus examination) and he began to take up students workshops in Newcastle, Durham and Birmingham, for which he wrote several plays.

was The Worlds, written for the Newcastle University Theatre Society, based on the recent events in the UK, both the Northern Ireland conflict and the social crisis of the winter of Discontent.

[45] Demling, noting that audience reactions to the most controversial scene in Saved partially resulted from its break in style from previous episodes' domestic realism, listed The Worlds as an example of a work in which Bond "integrates the grotesque more successfully into the plot.

[48] In 2002, Christopher Innes criticized Summer, as well as Human Cannon and Jackets II, as examples of a problem in Bond's later plays of protagonists who are either virtuous or evil, lacking complexity.

[46][52][53] David L. Hirst wrote that in the play Bond "skilfully reworks The Trojan Women so as to cast the image of that society into the present and inform contemporary political opinion.

[44] In 1985, he attempted to direct his War Plays at the RSC, accepting very bad working conditions, but left the rehearsals before the premiere after disastrous sessions, and then violently criticized the production and the theatre.

The first, Red Black and Ignorant (written for a Festival dedicated to George Orwell), is a short agitprop play in which a child, aborted and burnt to death in the nuclear global bombings, comes from the future to accuse the society of the audience of his murder.

"[78] In the Company of Men shows a desperate fight by the adoptive son of an armaments factory manager to be who he is in a cynical, intrigue-ridden neo-liberal business world that Bond considers the mirror of our post-modern times.

Kowalski praised "Bond's fine sense of style and rhythm" and argued that "one of the points made by the play is that we are moving towards a future where the huge multinationals will control all production indiscriminately"; however, the critic said that "the contrasting moods of the text were missed in performance: the black farce of Oldfield's demise, for instance, did not seem to be appreciated as such".

[74] Paul Taylor of The Independent called the play "interminable" and wrote, "Bond does not seem to have acquired the ability to distinguish between the genuine moments of surreal comedy in the script and the parts where it is straight-facedly unaware of its side-splitting potential.

It contrasts an initial, imaginary section resembling a gloomy fairy tale, in which a mother kills her child because she can no longer feed her, with a second, realistic part reproducing the historical Babi Yar massacre, where the same characters are among the victims.

[81] Benedict Nightingale said that most Bond plays from The Worlds onward "tended to combine vivid observation with a preachy radicalism that could take disconcertingly hardline forms" but praised Coffee (and The Crime of the 21st Century) as much livelier works.

[citation needed] The first in this cycle, The Crime of the 21st Century, shows a few outcasts who have fled the over-controlled cities to hide in a no-man's-land where they try in vain to rebuild their humanity by creating a semblance of community.

"[82] Have I None, Chair and The Under Room show the monotonous life of the cities, where social relationships and memory have been abolished, consumption and possession standardized, and where people are harassed by the resistance of their imagination and panicked by strangers.

Born and Innocence follow the actions of militarized policemen, the 'Wapos', who perpetrate atrocities on reluctant civilians during mass deportations, but some of whom try to find a human dimension to their lives and desperately attempt to escape the alienated and criminal conditions they are trapped in.

[83] From 1995 to 2009 he wrote seven very different plays dedicated to young audiences for this company: At the Inland Sea (1995), in which a youth confronts the legacy of the holocaust; Eleven Vests (1997), on scholastic and military authoritarianism; Have I None (2000), The Balancing Act (2003), The Under Room (2005) Tune (2007) and A Window (2009).

"[85] Conversely, it was claimed in a text released on the Savitribai Phule Pune University website that "Bond wants to bring out how school and family – the very institutions which are supposed to benevolently nurture childhood – start corrosively exercising repressive ownership and control of the child-self and yet the society is so ideologically blinded towards such occurrences that we talk endlessly about adolescent crimes and the problem of the irresponsible youth.

Among recent productions of his work have been revivals of Lear at the Crucible Theatre Sheffield featuring Ian McDiarmid and Restoration with added songs, toured in early 2006 by the Oxford Stage Company.

During the autumn of 2010 The Cock Tavern Theatre in London produced six of his plays simultaneously (one chosen from each decade), including a new one, provisionally entitled There Will Be More, commissioned for this occasion and performed although unfinished.

The Guardian's Lyn Gardner wrote, "There is some hard, unflinching writing here, but uncertain performances and an awkward, often unintentionally comic production make this seem perilously close to a parody of an Edward Bond play.

"[105] Conversely, Mark Taylor of The Independent wrote that "as its plot takes the path of least resistance between one primal convulsion after another, this starkly eloquent, theatrically knowing play stretches credulity to snapping point.