Os das Latas de Conserva

Edward Bond, British playwright, poet, and screenwriter (1934–2024), one of the most uncomfortable voices in British culture, author of several important plays that reshaped European theater from the 1960s onwards, in a context of the Cold War and nuclear threat.

The tin can people, part of the trilogy (The War Plays), is a prime example of a time we thought was dead and gone, but which we have now rediscovered and realised is definitely not. The “poet of an era of crises,” the essayist who restored theater’s subversive power and who wanted to prove that “there must and can be poetry after Auschwitz. Contemporary theater must account for two events: the concentration camps and the bomb.”

A post-Holocaust playwright, citizen of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the human world that is yet to be built, as he identified himself, Bond demonstrates an unshakeable faith in human beings: “we live in a world where our freedom is knowing exactly where we are in prison and the madness that is necessary to maintain sanity.” He believes in theater because it is the place “where one can most radically seek the truth.” In the reality in which we survive, in a temporal cycle in which CTB works on the time of Fear, we choose Bond and this play in the hope that it will help us discover where we are.