Paul Anderson, review
of Jackets II by Edward Bond (Bush), Tribune, 9 March 1990
Edward Bond’s new play, at the Bush for a short season in a
production by the Leicester Haymarket, is a dour polemical herald of
proletarian insurgency to come, set in a riot-torn city "somewhere in
Europe" where the army officers are Old Harrovians.
The plot is simple. Phil, a young rioter, loots clothes for
his mother and her friend, Mrs Tebham, whose son Brian, Phil's childhood
friend, is now a soldier, posted to his home town to quell the insurgency.
Brian's superiors want a martyr, and they decide to send him to certain death
in a rendezvous with an insurgent.
Predictably, the insurgent at the rendezvous turns out to be
Phil, who doesn't kill Brian but makes him feel so bad about being a class
traitor that he shoots himself instead. Phil leaves his jacket on the corpse,
and the police call his mother to identify the body. But Mrs Lewis becomes
hysterical in the morgue, and it is left to Mrs Tebham, there to support her
friend, to identify her own son as the dead man.
Bond manages to be genuinely shocking at times, and the
actors all do an excellent job. But the message that Belfast is coming to
Britain and that the proletariat had better be armed is too apocalyptic by half.
