Theatre forecast

The Sheffield Crucible has been the hottest regional theatre for a few years now, and in March all eyes will focus on the centrepiece of Michael Grandage's last season as artistic director: a revival of Edward Bond's epic Lear, a brutal variation on Shakespeare, considered by many to be the playwright's masterpiece. The production reunites the former artistic directorate of the Almeida Theatre in Islington, the director Jonathan Kent and the actor Ian McDiarmid.

Among the brand-name dramatists who came to prominence in the 1960s—Ayckbourn, Pinter, Stoppard, Gray, Bennett—the case of Edward Bond is the most puzzling. Much more of a temperamental outsider than any of his peers, and the nearest to Brecht in politics and fury, Bond was a totemic artist in the embattled Royal Court of that era. His moral seriousness and bleak, violent scenarios led to trouble with the censoring Lord Chamberlain (before his Bond-assisted demise in 1968) and outcry among the critics.

The flashpoint was Saved at the Royal Court in 1965, the most controversial play of the decade, because of its explicit sexual dialogue and the notorious scene where a baby is stoned to death in its pram by a bunch of south London hooligans. By the time Lear opened at the Royal Court in 1971, Bond was the biggest name on the left-wing theatre block, fêted throughout Europe. In 1974, John Gielgud appeared as Shakespeare (opposite Arthur Lowe as Ben Jonson) in Bingo, and Tom Courtenay followed in 1975 as John Clare in The Fool, two compelling studies in artistic disillusionment that ensured full houses and high critical profile.

But Bond disliked the way the major companies operated and started making demands, such as insisting on directing the plays himself, that made him an unpopular, or at least difficult, colleague in the democracy of most theatre organisations. Today, aged 70, Bond is almost a forgotten figure in the British theatre, having been in voluntary exile for 20 years.

He still lives in a village near Cambridge and gives his plays to students and amateur companies to perform. Six years ago, he forbade his agent to license a revival of Saved at the National Theatre. The NT, said Bond, "trivialises drama—and with a consequence that is so inevitable it is almost the punishment inflicted on error by history—has made itself incompetent to deal with the problems of being human."

His last large-scale play performed professionally here was The Woman, the first new play on the National's Olivier stage in 1978, an astounding, panoramic survey of Greek myths and misogyny. Since then, Bond has denounced an NT revival by Sam Mendes of The Sea (1973), a beautiful play of madness and dehumanisation in an Edwardian seaside town, and accused Trevor Nunn of turning the National into a "technicolour sewer."

He remains honoured to the point of adulation in Germany and has subscribed to the idea of his own importance by following the example of Brecht in supplying his work with the extra apparatus of poems, prefaces and notebooks. Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright summarised the Bond problem in their book Changing Stages (2000). Bond, they said, used to ask questions; now, he gives answers.

"As a socialist writer," Bond said to me after the collapse of the Soviet Union, "you knew there was a framework, a system to which the play might eventually refer. But now, the problem of the last act has returned! And I was always a critic of the system to start with. That's why I wrote my version of King Lear."

Lear stands at the crossroads of Bond's career, a tremendous account of a kingdom on the brink, not yet overrun by authorial prophecy or pomposity. Bond's Lear learns the value of hospitality through his daughters' cruelty and during his nation's bloody insurrection. The king is finally shot while attempting to hack down the wall he has dedicated his life towards building.

In 1971, Harry Andrews clambered up designer John Napier's amazing edifice that completely filled the tiny Court stage, as did the sense that, for all its violence, the play is an eloquent argument for pacifism. A small-scale revival at the RSC in 1982 (with Bob Peck as Lear and Mark Rylance as the Fool-like ghost) confirmed the play's greatness. Now the Sheffield revival could kickstart a reassessment of six or seven Bond plays that deserve canonical status.