CTB: Os das Latas de Conserva – Edward Bond

Edward Bond, British playwright, poet and screenwriter (1934-2024), one of the most uncomfortable voices in British culture, author of several important plays that reconstructed the theater of Europe from the 1960s onwards, in a context of cold war and nuclear threat. As Pessoas das Latas de Conserva (The People in the Tin Cans), the text that forms part of the trilogy (As Peças da Guerra) (The Plays of War), is a paradigmatic example of a time that we thought was dead and that we have now rediscovered is definitely not. The “poet of a time of crises”, the essayist who gave theater back its subversive power and who wanted to prove that “there must and can be poetry after Auschwitz” and that contemporary theater has to deal with two events: “the concentration camps and the bomb”. Post-Holocaust playwright, citizen of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima and the human world that has yet to be built, as he identified himself – Bond demonstrates an unshakeable faith in the human being: “we live in a world where our freedom is to know exactly where in the prison we are and the madness that is necessary to maintain sanity”. He believes in theater because it is the place “where you can most radically seek the truth”. In the reality in which we survive, in a time cycle in which CTB works on the time of O MEDO (THE FEAR), we have chosen Bond and this play, in the hope that it can help us all discover where we are.