Edward Bond interview

In The Guardian, Michael Billington talks to playwright Edward Bond whose play The Sea is being revived at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from January 17.

What is sad is that Bond's attempts to deal with the big issues of our time go largely unseen in Britain. Paris has become his working home, where the Theatre National de la Colline is staging a five-play cycle addressing what Bond calls "the search for human freedom". But it is difficult to determine where the blame lies for Bond's cultural isolation. He talks to me of the "nightmare" of staging his own play, The Woman, at the National in 1978: "It was a nightmare to do because the whole place was run like a biscuit factory. We had a run-through of The Woman and it was fantastic. I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'. When I first went to work at the Colline, people said, 'You remind us of why we became actors.' For the French, there is a tradition of using art, drama and painting to create an interpretation of human society."