Restoration

Description

Restoration is set in eighteenth-century England: a world of cruelty, injustice and iron privilege. Lord Are is forced by poverty into an unwanted marriage with the daughter of a wealthy mineowner. One morning, during breakfast, he commits a bizarre and fatal crime. He seeks to pin responsibility for it on his guileless, illiterate footman, Bob Hedges. A battle ensues between Bob's black, justice-hungry wife and the fortified privilege of the ruling classes. This is a new programme text edition of the play with minor revisions to the original text and produced for the tour by Oxford Staeg Company.

Edward Bond is one of the great Britsih playwrights of thetwentieth/twenty-first centuries. In 1965 his grim portrait of urbanviolence, Saved, in which a baby is stoned in its pram, aroused muchadmiration as well as a ban from the Lord Chamberlain. His provocativeplays [including Early Morning (1969), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), TheFool (1975), Restoration (1981), Summer (1982), The War Plays (1985)and Olly's Prison (1992)] continue to arouse extreme responses fromcritics and audiences.