Man as a Social Being

By T. E. Kalem

When Saved opened in London in 1965, it attained instant notoriety and provoked considerable outrage because of a scene in which a group of men stone a baby to death in its pram. The Lord Chamberlain, whose authority to censor plays has since been abolished, banned further showings. The Edward Bond play is now making its first New York appearance at the Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn. While the baby-killing episode is still potently emetic, playgoers have become inured to so many acts of gratuitous violence, on and offstage, that the scene now seems more prophetic than scandalous.

Saved takes place in the now familiar world of redbrick slavery, of lower-middle-class depths, of dirty diapers and dirtier sinks. The characters are like seedy relatives whom one loathes and loves--caustic embittered mom, silent spine-shattered dad, sluttish frustrated daughter. Into their midst comes Len (James Woods) the perennial innocent, scarily looking for sex at the beginning, resignedly settling in as a paying roomer at the end.

To relate the oppressive destiny of this house would be somewhat misleading, for the drama is saturated with fascinating Oedipal byplay and lit throughout with sudden match flares of humor. Saved would not be a matter of theatrical moment except that Edward Bond possesses a genuine dramatic imagination and the makings of a formidable playwright. His best dialogue is equal to Pinter's, and he can match Beckett when it comes to peering into the abyss of existence. While not as fine a playwright as either, he has something that the two greater dramatists lack: a keen sense of man as a social being.

Cosmic Confrontation. Pinter operates in isolation cells of intense domesticity. If there is a world outside the womb walls of his plays, no one could guess it. Beckett is in a paralyzed eye-socket-to-eye-socket confrontation with a cosmos vacated by God. He refuses to move beyond his grief. Bond says, in effect: "O.K., God is dead, but we've got to work out an ethic whereby we can survive on this planet with some degree of decency." Unlike Pinter, who seems to accept violence as a norm, Bond indicts the value vacuum and brutal boredom in which men can bring themselves to kill a baby as if it were the only chance to experience the thrill of efficacy.

Much of this must be intuited, for the Chelsea Theater production is murky. Hampered by a pedestrian cast, Alan Schneider provides a dilatory directorial hand. He has not propelled the action in a proper tempo, and in order to let the lines sink in, he has let the play sink, but Saved almost saves itself. sbT. E. Kalem

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