About the Play:

Saved was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

Saved is a full-length drama by Edward Bond about class and social strife in 1960s working-class London. A disturbing and visionary account of life in the modern city, Saved is now considered a masterpiece, celebrated for its role in the fight to abolish theatre censorship, and as a prime influence on modern playwrights.

Saved is a startling, brutal play concerned with Len, an unhappy loner, who stands by as some bored London youths throw stones at a baby in a carriage. When he realizes that he should have intervened, he is ultimately "saved." Described by its author as 'almost irresponsibly optimistic', the play set in London in the sixties. Its subject is the cultural poverty and frustration of a generation of young people on the dole and living on council estates. With its scenes of violence, including the stoning of a baby, Saved became a notorious play and a cause célèbre. In a letter to the Observer, Sir Laurence Olivier wrote: "Saved is not a play for children but it is for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it."

Saved, the second and most famous play by Edward Bond, was first staged privately in November 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre before members of the English Stage Society in a time when plays were still censored. The play was banned and prosecuted creating a national scandal, which was instrumental in the abolition of censorship of the English stage (which finally happened in 1968), and established Edward Bond as a major British playwright.

Cast: 3 women, 7 men

What people say:

"Bond's grimly powerful indignation is a reminder that a society that maintains an underclass tolerates a measure of barbarity." — The New York Times

"...a great playwright – many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright." — The Independent

About the Playwright:

Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved, the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. He has written two notable screenplays: for Tony Richardson's Laughter in the Dark, adapting Nabokov, and for Nicolas Roeg's Australian-made Walkabout, in which he invested a children's story with unsettling perceptions about cultural differences. He is broadly considered one among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.