Bingo – review

When Angus Jackson's fine production of Edward Bond's bony masterpiece was first seen in Chichester two years ago, a respected colleague attacked the author for his assumption of moral superiority over Shakespeare. But I don't see it that way. Bond's play is a guilt-ridden indictment of all poets and dramatists, himself included, for their exploitation of suffering and cruelty. "Every writer," as Bond's Shakespeare claims, "writes in other men's blood."

You could argue for ever about whether that is a just charge. But what matters is the dramatic conviction of Bond's portrait of Shakespeare in his Stratford retirement. This is the Bard who once wrote of "the dark house and the detested wife": a brooding, isolated figure who is bourgeois enough to protect his profits as a landowner, but who is also haunted by the public execution of a female vagrant whom he has vainly tried to protect. With extraordinary poetic economy, Bond evokes the horrors of Shakespeare's world. In place of Merrie England, we get a panoramic portrait of religious persecution, judicial severity and ubiquitous violence. In an image I find hard to erase, Bond's Shakespeare talks of "Women with shopping bags stepping over puddles of blood".

Patrick Stewart superbly reinforces Bond's vision by giving us a tragic Shakespeare, but also one alive to his own contradictions: he craves financial security but tells his nagging daughter that "money always turns to hate", is brusquely business-like with a rich landowner like William Combe yet strangely relaxed with a wander-witted gardener. I have known Lears who have moved me less. Richard McCabe relishes every syllable of a wildly drunken, biliously jealous Ben Jonson and, although Alex Price needs to attend to his diction as a puritan zealot, there is first-rate support from John McEnery, Matthew Marsh and Catherine Cusack. It's an evening that confirms Bond's 1973 play has achieved the status of a modern classic.