Introduction Wearing Dead Men’s Clothes: Addressing the Past, Re-dressing the Future

Abstract

Edward Bond is one of the major British dramatists of the post-war period. He remains arguably one of the most provocative voices in British theatre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An integral element in helping to assess the value and status of his writing over the past half-century is the wider international context in which both his earlier major works and more recent plays are produced. From the early to mid 1990s especially, his plays have received a substantial critical reception in France. His plays have also been successfully produced in Germany, Italy and more recently Canada.