The persuasive bleakness of Edward Bond's dystopian visions can make life turn to ashes in your mouth. Thankfully the final part of his 'Chair' trilogy also features some of his best satirical writing, from the extermination camp equipped with a landscaped garden where 'the wardens eat their lunchtime sandwiches', to the attempts of a clipped government official to 'decode' a wordless groan of suffering.
Bond's most controversial hit, 'Saved', ends on a faint note of hope, with the mending of a chair. Here we begin with the lending of one. The act takes place in a militaristic bureaucracy where all human connectedness is suspect (a change in public sentiment is 'a mutation'). Soon pity itself is on trial.
Bond, who also directs, draws brilliantly tender performances from Tanya Moodie and Timothy O'Hara who play, respectively, Alice (a woman who takes her life in her hands when she sees a soldier and his prisoner waiting at a bus stop with no seat), and Billy, who's spent 26 years hidden in Alice's sparse apartment doing crayon drawings of a world he's never seen.
An unusually attentive reader of both newspapers and hearts, Bond uses Billy's terrible vulnerability and fear to tug where we're most tender – what will happen to our children after we're gone? – while presenting every hellish aspect of the year 2077 as a child our lack of vigilance begot. No wonder his anger leads him just a scene too far.