Bingo: Scenes Of Money And Death

by Edward Bond

dward Bond's play "Bingo" subtitled "Scenes of money and death" is about the last days of Shakespeare. Bond's Shakespeare has withdrawn from the theatre and lives in Stratford the life of a well-to-do country gentleman. But the material security he has worked to achieve brings him no peace or happiness and the play evokes the image of an exhausted genius tormented with conscience about his own cruelty to his family, the cruelty of the society he believes in and his own equivocal achievements. "Was anything done?" he asks repeatedly.

Genres: Plays, Shakespeare, Drama

69 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 1974

About the author

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bond

Reviews

[Connor B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never go into a play thinking you’ve found the “English Brecht” because you haven’t, you really haven’t.

[Passer by · Rating 2 out of 5]

The two stars are for how Judith character is portrayed because I really enjoyed how Bond portrayed her daddy issues and the father-daughter conflict, however, the rest of the play is extremely silly and boring.

[Nick Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty years after it was written, Bingo still seems to be a controversial play – at least, there seems little consensus on its value. When it was revived in London ten years ago, some of the reviewers acclaimed it as a modern classic, others dismissed it as a heavy handed polemic. To a certain degree this is a political divide, reviewers on the liberal-left tended to be more sympathetic than conservatives. A play about William Shakespeare and his last days of retirement in Stratford-upon-Avon. Historically we know little, if anything, about Shakespeare’s character, it is all supposition. I found the Shakespeare presented in Bingo to be consistent and believable. I’m aware of other representations of Shakespeare (e.g., Shakespeare in Love) as a personification of his plays: he is brimming with life, emotionally outgoing and all encompassing, a figure of enthusiasm and adventure. (Ben Jonson turns up in scene 5 and is a closer fit to this imagining of the artist.) In Bingo there is the implication that the younger Shakespeare was an observer rather than a doer, now, his creativity at an impasse, he has collapsed into a passive depression. He is largely subdued. He has been emotionally open to the world throughout his life and now it has worn him down. We can think of him as a character cleaved by an internal tension, but this is not expressed in psychological terms, rather it is projected out onto the world. Shakespeare is a respectable figure in the community and the landowners are enclosing the common land, i.e., transferring shared land into private property owned by the established landowners – in the play the landowners are represented by William Combe and he offers to safeguard Shakespeare’s interests if he supports the enclosures. As an entrepreneur, as a theatre owner, Shakespeare is aligned with the landowners. There is an opposition to the enclosing of the common land, but it is led by a Puritan preacher…a figure totally outside of Shakespeare’s sympathy. If he has an emotional sympathy, it is towards the social outsider, the young beggar woman who faces the disapproval of both Combe and the Puritan…with violent consequences. These social conflicts and tensions are displayed with cool dispassion (the obvious word is Brechtian) and while Shakespeare may be the central character, events occur around him, Shakespeare playing no active part: it might be the world that inspires his writing, but he plays no active part in conflicts. He is, however, at odds with the women of his household, his daughter Judith and his wife (who we hear but do not see): Bond depicts them as shrill and bitter, and Shakespeare is dismissive, seeing them as little more than impediments or weights – I'm uncertain if this too easily slips into the great man being held back (and misunderstood) by the mundane women. This is only the second work I’ve read by Edward Bond, but I found it considerably more engaging than Lear.

Passion is a short, minor work written for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It is a sort of comic parable.

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read in preparation for my Third Year University Course on Tragedy. Again, I’m finding the vast majority of these plays to be beyond my frail intellect. They seem a little to lofty and abstract for me. That being said, I much preferred this one to many of the others, as I could easily follow the story, and appreciated being able to recognise the characters at first glance. An interesting take on Shakespeare, and the ways in which a writer can interact with their locality. I am excited to learn more about all of these texts from my tutors, and to consider their difference from the Classic and Shakespearean tragic dramas I have encountered and come to love. Perhaps soon I will be snow to say the same for contemporary plays.

[Ola El-Gohary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely intriguing though Bond might be biased against Shakespeare, but I loved his portrayal of the characters and the details of the subtext.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

bond grapples with the heartbreaking truth that being one of the most visionary writers of all time didn't stop shakespeare from totally surrendering art and becoming a coldhearted bourgeois

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I supposed I'd really give this roughly 3.75 stars, I'm not totally sure I'd go all the way to 4.
The idea of this play was a really interesting one--that being materially comfortable implicates one in the exploitation of others, as much as if one personally engaged in exploitation. However, I am not sure the execution was effective. During the first portion of the play I found Shakespeare really aloof, and I wasn't that interested in him. Perhaps this is something that a skilled actor would take care of, but when the character is simply present on the page without being engaged, it is hard to get a good feel for him. However in the scene where he is drunk and raving in the snow, I found him an extremely intriguing figure--like Lear mad on the heath (a connection Bond draws in the play's intro), Shakespeare sees that his own relative wealth results from the suffering and exploitation of his fellow man; he comes face to face with his own guilt in a guilty system and the only response to that encounter is madness.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Shakespeare is the main character in this play about money and greed, and though I'm usually a sucker for any literature/film/project that turns Shakespeare into a character, I'm a bit suspicious that the use of the Bard was mostly an attention-getting gimmick. In fact, the portrayal of Shakespeare was distracting from the play as a whole, and his guilt over neglecting his family by living in London to make money felt underdeveloped.

Still, this was more interesting that I expected. I enjoyed the very comic portrayal of Ben Jonson, and I also suspect that the last scene could be very powerful when staged.

Still not sure why I read this play written in the 1970s and set in 1615 for my 19th c drama class...

[Hagar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shakespeare is resurrected in a modern play! We get to see Shakespeare, his daughters, and his relationships to them, Ben Jonson..and all acting before us! This clear allusion is to serve the modern themes about today's world of greed, where did we reach? the role of literature...is it in an ivory tower not helping societies?

An interesting play to read...not to mention to act on stage as well!

[Магдалена · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I'm not that into Bond's plays.

[Alex Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5