Saved (Modern Classics)

Product Information

The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out, by Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin. London, Oberon Books, 2007.

Pam brings home a man she just met named Len to have sex, but they have to use the living room. Harry, Pam’s dad, makes several passes in and out of the room, interrupting them every time. Pam takes her dad’s appearances in stride, and at one point Len and Pam suggestively offer him some candy. When Harry finally leaves for work, Pam begins to undress Len. Deposits. Once the account is open, you have a short period of time to fund it (normally less than one month). After that, you can’t make any more deposits or withdrawals to your account until it matures. If you really do have to access the funds, it may be a slow process and you’ll incur a penalty (usually forfeiting interest earned). As the title implies, this is ultimately a play about the possibility of redemption. As a piece of theatre, it also has an austere clarity that is beautifully realised in Holmes's production. Each of the 13 scenes makes its point without the underlining you sometimes get in the Brechtian model. Bond is now considered to be one of the major living English playwrights. Despite this, the 'difficult' reputation which dogs both the man and his plays means he is rarely performed today. Bond is still writing and still politically engaged. Often he provides the introduction to his own published plays, and these polemical pieces clearly show the author's political and social standpoint, though they rarely provide a direct insight into his writing. The plays, we must assume he believes, speak for themselves. Fred, age twenty-one, blond, good looking, and powerfully built, is the man Pam becomes obsessed with and who she claims is the father of her baby. Although he is only one of the gang that murders the baby in the park, Fred is the one who is charged and who goes to jail. Still, Fred feels he is not guilty of a crime because ‘‘It were only a kid.’’ Fred, like the others, is never able to see the baby as a human being. Women are very attracted to Fred and he has a new woman, Liz, waiting for him when he is released from jail.Mary, Pam’s mother, is fifty-three, short with bulky breasts, big thighs, and ‘‘curled gray hair that looks as if it is in a hair-net. Homely.’’ She and her husband Harry have not spoken for many years, though neither seems to remember the cause. Mary is not a warm mother-figure, however. She claims to feel pity for the crying baby but does nothing to comfort it; she bashes Harry on the head with a teapot; she partakes in a highly sexual scene with Len. She is as empty of human values as her daughter, Pam. Harry, the sixty-eight-year-old father of Pam. An older version of Len, he is also on the outside looking in. He spies on all the sexual encounters in the house, never interfering or reacting until he catches Mary trying to seduce Len. Generally a taciturn character, he does explain to Len why he puts up with everything: He will allow neither his wife nor his daughter to drive him from his home, the only secure place that he has. It is little enough, but it is all he has. Pam, the twenty-three-year-old mother of an illegitimate child, to whom she refers only as “it.” Numbed by the constant arguments in her home, by poverty, by drink, and by watching television, she is filled with a kind of hopeless cynicism that is in sharp contrast to Len’s seemingly unwarranted optimism about making things better. She can feel only lust and not love, reacting to Len’s affection with hostility and to Fred’s abandonment with desperation. Even the death of her child does not touch her. She is as much a victim of society as her child is, and her inability to feel is a product of that influence rather than of any innate difficulty. You could argue that Bond underplays the element of personal responsibility. But what he pinned down so vividly in 1965 is something that seems even more true today: that if you create an unjust society, in which those at the bottom of the heap are condemned to a life of meaningless materialism, then you are simply laying up trouble for the future. What, however, gives Bond's play a tiny shred of hope is the extraordinary final scene in which Len, who for much of the action has been Pam's punchbag, meticulously mends a chair.

As a rule of thumb, fixed-rate bonds can be convenient if you have a fairly big chunk of money to deposit in them. If you don’t, they’re probably not worth the risk. Fixed-rate bonds are a popular type of savings account that can offer savers a higher interest rate in return for leaving a lump sum of money with a bank for an agreed timeframe. Because the interest rate is “fixed”, it won’t change even if market conditions (and the Bank of England base rate) change. That means you’ll know from the outset exactly how much you’re going to earn on your savings.Nor, of course, is the experience easy to take pleasure from. "Why, oh why did I agree to watch this?" Lori Hopkins of a Younger Theatre demands."I found myself looking around the auditorium just to reassure myself that what I was witnessing was make-believe. To say this is an enjoyable performance would be far from the truth, but is it an important and emotional experience? I would say yes."

Fred is in jail whining to Pam about how he was victimized by a crowd of angry wives upon being brought to the jail. Pam is not angry at Fred even though Fred casts blame upon her for having a baby in the first place. He also suggests that a group of hooligans killed the baby. Len shows up with cigarettes for Fred, and after Pam leaves, Len informs Fred that he was a witness to the entire event.In his book on theatre censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions, Nicholas de Jongh suggests it was the violence of Bond's "real-life, demotic speech" that horrified his audience. Certainly, the Times's Irving Wardle retracted his criticisms in 1966, admitting: "What really got to me was that these people spoke like urban cavemen." to distinguish Barry from his friends, but it is he who leads the assault on the baby in scene six and who throws the last stone at the baby at point blank range.