[No] one would have guessed from the title or the sub-title [of Edward Bond's Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death] that its hero was William Shakespeare. This is entirely appropriate because in an important sense it is not about Shakespeare at all….

[Essentially the play] is the continuation of an argument Bond had begun earlier …, in Narrow Road to the Deep North, his bitter parable about the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho. In the play, you will recollect, Basho helped to bring terrible suffering to his country by ignoring individual suffering as he travelled north in search of personal enlightenment.

The subject of Bingo is the same: the utter inadequacy, indeed the harmfulness, of the artist as a social animal. Bond's point is that writing is not enough: the artist is a man among men and must be a functioning part of the moral structure of society….

[In an interview with Gambit Bond] said that 'art is the confrontation of justice with law and order'—a definition which might have made even Shelley uneasy. (I take it that Bond was using these much abused words in their modish false meaning of 'reaction and repression'.) This prepares you for the fact that the writer Bond would most despise is one who sides with 'law and order.' Such a writer, for him, is Shakespeare. (p. 28)

Like most of Bond's plays, Bingo is a play of conscience. The very structure shows its severe moral intention: the first three scenes relate Shakespeare's offence, the second three present his retribution. (p. 29)

[Bond] has always been a moralist; but a moral view of life means seeing it in terms of acts and their consequences. Morality demands the responsibility of logic; yet Bond of ten comes over as a dramatist of stark statement. Morality, in the theatre, also demands the responsibility of scrupulous characterisation; Bond likes to present states of mind which do not respond to our questioning. (pp. 29-30)

[Both] Early Morning, Bond's only really bad play, and Lear are fatally weakened by an almost total absence of moral reasoning. 'Souls live and bodies die,' says Prince Arthur, the suffering hero of Early Morning; and Bond's plays could be described as a world of soulless bodies and dead souls where the cause of death is almost impossible to identify. Always we are left with the conclusion that we live in an unspeakably cruel world: a rhetorical message that has the finality and the self-justification of a nightmare. This is why Bond's plays so often breed either indifference or unquestioning devotion. The most compassionate mind reels into dulled impotence if it is confronted with nothing but abrupt and unexplained examples of human monstrosity. On the other hand, temperamental pessimists and shallow anarchists respond to Bond's plays with the unquestioning gratitude that comes from reassurance.

The paradox is that both reactions are deeply contrary to the aims of a compassionate moralist which is the stance Bono takes. Time and again he creates the expectation of a moral argument made up of understanding, compassion and unsparing inquiry; all too often he ends up as the dramatist of narcosis.

One aspect of this, by the way, is his treatment of politicians and public men. For Bond representatives of power, indeed of organised society, are stereotyped monsters: vicious, or dotty, or both….

Bond's best play is The Sea, the last one he wrote before Bingo. Here he has come to terms with his apostolic temperament and the practical problems of a moral view of the world. In other words he presents not unmotivated puppets but people. (p. 30)

The evil that people do to one another is put in the context of their own suffering: the aching flesh seeks to inflict pain on someone else. Yet Bond invites no facile pity….

For in almost all Bond's plays there is a killing, and a great deal of their action takes place with a dead body on stage. I have said that his plays are plays of conscience; they are also, in yet another paradoxical sense, plays of pity. In every one of them (Bingo is no exception) someone asks for help and is refused. 'The man without pity is mad,' his Lear says, but it is remarkable how few of Bond's characters show any, and how often those who do, like Len in Saved, carry decency to the point of softness or feebleness. They do not raise a hand. They can prevent nothing, neither do they try. They have only a dogged, grim humanity; they endure, when they do, like stone.

Indeed, the real indictment of the violence in Bond's plays is not so much that it is often gratuitous (it is), or overdone (it is), but that it is unopposed…. Bond seems to say that humanity is made up of murderous beasts and helpless or feeble-minded victims; that the world is entirely predatory and almost devoid of human charity and kindness. In the face of that the spectator can only stand up and declare that it isn't, it isn't, it isn't.

Let me finally return to Bingo. It is filled with the same anger Bond had expressed about Basho and his poetry in the Gambit interview; and it is another of the great contradictions of his art that he, a careful craftsmen and a considerable master of language, can so summarily dismiss an artist. Shakespeare's works are simply not relevant to Bingo, just as Basho's were not to Narrow Road, except as the (by implication) useless products of wasted or pernicious lives. And yet the earlier play seems to have been inspired by something more than Bond's dislike of a self-regarding poet. Its language, like the language of Bond's few published poems, reminds you again and again of the Japanese haiku itself. At its best it is spare, concise, densely poetic; and the most memorable passages of Bond's plays all have just such a bony, allusive eloquence. This is why, in production, the plays need such carefully placed silences. And so it is no accident that many of Bond's characters are watchers and listeners. Sometimes indeed it is their silence that condemns them: Len, Basho, Lear and Shakespeare all have to pay, in the end, for being silent when they should have spoken. (p. 31)

[Bingo] fails in the end not only because of the improbability of Shakespeare's death [a suicide]; not only because Bond never explains, cannot explain, why Shakespeare had got into a state of moral checkmate in the first place; but also because of the formal, over-written language of his disintegration in the snow. The phrases are ponderous, turgid and hollow: they present the idea but not the suffering of human failure. This climactic scene carries intellectual force but no real feeling and conviction whatever. Bond the puritan moralist executes Shakespeare; Bond the poet, who wrote The Sea and the last scene of Saved, seems to cooperate without conviction. It is as if, in killing the other poet, he were killing a part of himself. (p. 32)