Bingo (play)

Bingo was first presented at the Northcott Theatre, Devon on 14 November 1973. It was directed by Jane Howell and John Dove, with the following cast:


The play opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 14 August 1974, again directed by Jane Howell and John Dove; this time with John Gielgud (Shakespeare), John Barrett (Old man), Gillian Martell (Judith) and Arthur Lowe (Ben Jonson).^[13] There were queues at the box office to see Sir John; and The New York Times praised his performance and director Howell's "clean, lucid sense of line," adding, "The text is as uncompromising as anything Bond has written, and its performance serves it as sparely and unshowily as a dedicated string quartet addressing itself to Bach or late Beethoven."^[14]


The play’s American Premiere occurred in January 1976 at the Yale Rep. Appearing in rotating repertory, the play had a limited run. Shakespeare was portrayed by Alvin Epstein.


The play was revived by the RSC, opening on 25 July 1995 at Stratford's Swan Theatre, directed by David Thacker, with Paul Jesson (Shakespeare), Ken Farrington (Old man), Sarah-Jane Holm (Judith) and Dominic Letts (Ben Jonson).^[15] The production played in repertory and on tour with The Tempest.^[16] According to Edward Bond, "the critic's notices were bad...I haven't seen it."^[17]


It was revived again at the Young Vic Theatre, opening on 16 Feb 2012, directed by Angus Jackson, with a cast led by Patrick Stewart (Shakespeare), John McEnery (Old Man), Catherine Cusack (Judith) and Richard McCabe (Ben Jonson). Bond, regarded by the directorial establishment as a difficult personality, claimed he was "banned from the rehearsal room" during production.^[18] The production, according to Michael Billington in The Guardian, "confirms Bond's 1973 play has achieved the status of a modern classic."^[19] Neil Dowden of Exeunt also praised McCabe's Ben Jonson as "scene-stealing [...] full of entertaining candour and self-loathing wit".^[20]

Bond's Introduction[edit]

Like George Bernard Shaw, Bond generally wrote lengthy prose introductions for his plays. Bond begins the introduction to Bingo by mentioning the minor historical inaccuracies he introduced into the play for dramatic purposes; for example, the Globe Theatre burned down in 1613 rather than in 1616, and Michael Drayton was also present at Shakespeare's "last binge."^[6] The rest of the introduction explains Bond's view of the relationship between "human values," society, and art. Although he finds much suffering and violence in his own and in Shakespeare's time, Bond is not ultimately pessimistic; he attributes this violence not to human nature but to the arrangement of society, which can be reformed. Reflecting his Marxist views, Bond argues that the demands of capitalism force people to act in aggressive, self-interested ways that conflict with their innate human values: "We're wrong when we assume we're free to use money in human ways," Bond writes.^[21] He then argues that the proper role of art is to work against this corrupted version of society: "(Art) always insists on the truth, and tries to express the justice and order that are necessary to sanity but are usually destroyed by society."^[22] Shakespeare's dilemma in Bingo is that he is caught between his financially motivated behaviour and his artistic sensibility of the destructiveness of that behaviour: "Shakespeare's plays show this need for sanity and its political expression, justice. But how did he live? His behavior as a property-owner made him closer to Goneril than Lear. He supported and benefited from the Goneril-society – with its prisons, workhouses, whipping, starvation, mutilation, pulpit-hysteria and all the rest of it."^[5]

Reception[edit]

Bingo has had a mixed reception from critics.^[23] After the November 1973 premiere at the Northcott Theatre, some wrote favorably about the play while others felt Bond had denigrated Shakespeare.^[24]


In 1974, Ronald Bryden of The New York Times billed Bingo as "a passionately cold, powerfully unforgiving play" from the "Royal Court's most important playwright".^[25] The Austin Chronicle's Barry Pineo described Shakespeare as the play’s least engaging character but wrote, "While this diminishes the impact of Bond's play, it does not eclipse it. Rarely have I encountered a playwright with a more clear social conscience, and rarely one who could express it with such visceral impact. Bingo is a lucid indictment of any society that puts monetary values over human values."^[26] In a review of the 2010 revival by Angus Jackson, The Guardian's Michael Billington said that "Bond's portrait of Shakespeare as a guilt-ridden figure, haunted by memories of the cruelty and injustice of his society, is moving and plausible. But Billington criticized "Bond's implicit suggestion that art is impotent in the face of violence and suffering [...] while plays may not overturn the social order, they can both reflect and unsettle it."^[27]


In 2011, M. Ramana Raju and V. Ravi Naidu declared, "This play [...] can be considered to be an eye-opener to all the people of the society regarding inhumanity and injustice which are becoming dominant."^[28] It was described in The Stage as "a trenchant portrait of an artist in his domestic and political setting".^[29] Neil Norman of Daily Express praised the scene in which Ben Jonson gets drunk with Shakespeare as funny, and also argued that "the penultimate scenes in a snow-covered field offer a moving metaphor for the impermanence of life itself as Stewart rolls around like a wounded bear, torn apart by his own guilt."^[30] In another review of a 2012 performance at Young Vic, Billington dubbed Bingo a "bony masterpiece" and described the work as "a guilt-ridden indictment of all poets and dramatists, himself included, for their exploitation of suffering and cruelty." The critic lauded Bond as having "extraordinary poetic economy".^[19] Mark Lawson said in 2016 that out of the few writers who had created Shakespeare bio-dramas, Bond "finds the most convincing voice for Shakespeare. Speaking a recognisable modern English in contrast to the phonetically presented Warwickshire dialect of the locals, the dying writer is given bleak, Lear-like prose, as when snowfall makes him reflect".^[31] Donald Clarke of The Irish Times called it a "fine play" in a 2019 review of a film about Shakespeare.^[32]


Other critics dismissed the play. In 1994, Lawrence Bommer of Chicago Reader panned Bond as "a rigid, humorless ideologue. Though William Shakespeare wrote plays more powerful than life, Bond naively expects the man to be as complete as his creations--as compassionate as Prospero, as furious at hypocrisy as Hamlet, as enraged at poverty as broken Lear. [...] And no antagonist offers an alternative to the bard's enervation".^[33] The same year, Chicago Tribune's Richard Christensen argued, "This state of a slow wasting away may be, as Bond states in a preface to his play, the only logical conclusion one can come to on the dying and death of Shakespeare if one examines the known facts about his closing years. But, though this may make the playwright's premise authentic, it unfortunately does not make his play engaging."^[34] In 2010, Karen Fricker wrote that Patrick Stewart's performance "cannot liven up the play’s heavy-handed politics and lack of compelling action. [...] That not much important action takes place on stage may be part of his point, but adds to the feeling this is more of a lesson than a drama."^[35]


A reviewer in the Evening Standard argued that "Bond's lugubrious, monotonous writing transforms the potent subject matter into something wearingly reductive. [...] Bond's tone and range is limited".^[36] Ismene Brown of The Arts Desk wrote, "It's a damn good set-up, not nice but plausible – still I’m not sure that this really adds up to a play about characters who change, rather than a tiptilted hommage. [...] Bond guns the social issues, but stumbles over the necessary language to make these ancillary characters sparkle – they prate, they strike attitudes (proto-feminism, proto-socialism), they’re even boring."^[37] The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer panned the work as a "priggish and schematic play".^[38] In the same paper, Tim Walker lauded Richard McCabe's performance as Ben Jonson but referred to the play itself as "very boring". Walker said Stewart "makes the best of what is a rather unappealing part [and] little more than a vehicle for a rather minor writer to attempt to score points against an incomparably greater one."^[39] According to Belinda Liversedge of Londonist, "the ideas somehow don't translate into magic on stage. [...] His indirect involvement to the tragedies seems too flimsy evidence to pin any guilt on him or explain his anguish." She also criticized Judith as "a rather lifeless character and that's nothing to do with Catherine Cusack's performance."^[40]