On Edward Bond’s Dramaturgy of Crisis in The Chair Plays: The Dystopian Imagination and the Imagination in Dystopia

In this article I examine how Edward Bond realizes his dramaturgy of crisis through dystopian imagination in The Chair Plays. I argue that Bond’s idea of ‘crisis’ refers to the ‘logic of Auschwitz’ in an Adornian sense, that is, the crisis of modernist instrumental rationality. His dystopia is a chronotope of the extreme form of such rationality that demarcates the limits of imagination and freedom. Then I move on to examine The Chair Plays, that is, Chair (2000), Have I None (2000) and The Under Room (2005), to demonstrate how different possibilities of freedom in the dystopian world are articulated. Based on the analysis, I conclude that the rationality of Bond’s dystopia is closely associated with the legal sphere and one of the aims of Bond’s dystopian drama is to reexamine the relation between human freedom and legal rationality. I. A dramatist who writes about society must write about the future. The present is too close to be written about knowingly. The future is the hidden purpose of drama, of all art. A dramatist has only two subjects: the future and the past which is the origin of the future. (Bond “Third Crisis” 14) In ‘The Third Crisis’, the introduction to The Chair Plays, which was published to coincide with the production at the Lyric Ham-