Saved (Modern Classics)

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Bond places much attention on violence and he focuses on the breakdown of civilization’s rules, and this notably happens in a working-class area of London. Whilst the audience are presented with a range of male characters the female characters share key characteristics – they are intolerant, resentful and suspicious and they express this through interminable soprano tirades. Len, a young London man, and Pam, a young London woman whom he has just met, are the play's central characters. The most notorious play of the 1960s to depict violence is Bond’s Saved with its baby-stoning scene. Although the defendants pleaded guilty and were fined, the case reflected badly on the censorship office and was pivotal in the abolition of theatre censorship a few years later in 1968.

The answer appears to be the consequences to the intervention (Sanderson’s last point), whatever Len imagined them to be, outweighed the benefits of saving his own flesh and blood. We knew the play was going to be controversial, but one perhaps expected a more considered reaction. For Holmes, however, "What's really shocking about the play is the vulnerability and humanity of everyone in it, how delicate they are despite the world they live in doing everything to squeeze that out of them.One might also interpret Bond’s quote as meaning that Len does not look away from the ugliness of his community whilst he nonetheless continues to turn the other cheek meaning that he shuns violence and does not seek retribution of any kind. In a way, murder has been an experience which has helped both Pete and Harry to come to terms with themselves. January 1st arrives amid lingering holiday indulgence, often leaving us with hangovers and half-hearted promises of change.

Len could easily substitute for the child as victim and one wonders if his abstinence from the public sacrifice is also partly self-protection which would indeed reveal him in a cowardly light. I knew there was no baby in the pram, just as I could see there were no stones in the actors’ hands. In his preface to his play Lear (1971), Bond asserts that of all the human race children are subject to the most violence because the world is not geared to meet their “biological expectations”; “the weight of aggression in our society is so heavy that the unthinkable happens: we batter [the child] … the dramatic metaphor I used to describe it was the stoning of a baby in its pram. Violence is apparently the key to understanding Saved yet the lead character is incapable of aggression.

Nevertheless, she is intransigent and will not attend to the child on a matter of misguided principle. The baby’s pram was of fifties/sixties design, which certainly provided a sense of reassurance that we were watching a piece of history, a ‘period piece’ – an important contribution to a British canon of political plays that we can set in a very specific socio-cultural era. In line with this definition, one can say that Len did not act to save the baby since it was possible that Fred, Mike, Pete, Colin, or Barry could have intervened at any time to stop the attack.