Caption: Playwright Edward Bond to deliver inaugural lecture at Newman University, Birmingham

On Monday 16th April, Playwright Edward Bond will be visiting Newman University in Birmingham to deliver a lecture titled ‘The Third Crisis: nihilism and the silence of modernity’.

The lecture will focus on how Drama relates to the current cultural and political situation.

Bond has recently published ‘Dea; The Testament of this Day; The Price of One; The Angry Roads; The Hungry Bowl’ which brings together recent work by the writer.

Bond has been widely regarded as the UK’s greatest and most influential playwright. Bond comments “the most famous question in British drama is “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Shakespeare wrote it at the start of a brave new world, the beginning of the Enlightenment and democracy. A character in my play Dea re-writes the question for our time. “To be sane or not to be sane, that is the question – and if not, then to be mad and all that follows.” Throughout the world politics and society are in chaos.

“A few years ago President Trump would have been a figure in a cartoon. Now he’s creating tactical nuclear weapons because the strategic ones are too terrible to use – they would turn the world into a mortuary. If tactical weapons are used, the strategic ones would also have to be used! It would be a military necessity. Death is good for business, till you run out of customers. Brexit is the grave of a nation. The human race is no longer in control of itself.

“I’m often told my plays are about the coming disaster. Now the disaster is catching up on them. What will happen when it overtakes them? At the best there will be terrible complications, at the worst there will be a new dark age. That’s why I wrote the plays in Volume Ten.”

The lecture, which begins at 7pm on 16th April, is open to members of the public as well staff and students at the university. For further information visit the events page of the Newman University website.