BINGO
British playwright Edward Bond is a rigid, humorless ideologue. Though William Shakespeare wrote plays more powerful than life, Bond naively expects the man to be as complete as his creations–as compassionate as Prospero, as furious at hypocrisy as Hamlet, as enraged at poverty as broken Lear. Woe to him for being merely human.
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In the 1973 Bingo, cryptically subtitled Scenes of Money & Death, Bond imagines, without relying on fact, the bard six months before his death, in 1616. Forlornly haunting the garden of New Place, his imposing Stratford home, he is no contented country gentleman enjoying the fruits of a full career. Mired in a funk, he sits indifferent to starving, even hanged, peasants, on whose rent he lives, as well as to his demented, mistreated wife and his practical daughter Judith, who despises him for ignoring the world. “Life doesn’t seem to touch you,” she says, but he rejects her for such “banalities.”
Bond’s leftist indignation at the unremarkable fact that Shakespeare was not the sum of his lines is as pathetic as the pieties of conservative Victorians who glibly assumed only good people could write moral works. But however wrongheaded its assumptions, Bingo might still intrigue if Bond had discovered some conflict in the situation. Of course that’s impossible with a protagonist who’s a beaten man before we meet him, passive to the point of paralysis and depressed to the point of suicide. And no antagonist offers an alternative to the bard’s enervation: the play just dumps on Shakespeare until it kills him off.
