Saved (Modern Classics)

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It is tempting to say that Bond’s play is a stark condemnation of the working/lower classes of English society except that Len contradicts this interpretation through his exceptionalism.

Within Pam’s family, there is no appreciable emotional consequence since we witness no mourning or sense of loss.He is not in a position to rescue the child by becoming the guardian himself, so a tragic fate takes its course. He lives with people at their most hopeless (that is the point of the final scene) and does not turn away from them. Bond places much attention on violence and he focuses on the breakdown of civilization’s rules, and this notably happens in a working-class area of London. They take time to adapt to the new situation, and most of them react in a rather conventional way; and although each one’s attitude may be designed to impress the others, they do not totally hide the concern they feel.

Pam abandons her child in the middle of the park after her fight with Fred, signalling that the child has zero value even to its own mother. For example, he shows the scarcity of good careers and the abundance of dead-end jobs for London’s young, but he simultaneously highlights parenting skills in this specific community which are often sub-standard to the point of being dangerous. Fred and Len's friends Pete, Colin, Mike and Barry turn up, as does Pam, who is wheeling the baby in a pram. Over the course of one scene, Pam fights with Len and with her mother Mary while the neglected baby cries continually. Love thy neighbour’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ are sayings most easily attributable to the Bible but modern man is neutered by their observation rather than empowered.She starts to show signs of caring for him, by offering to knit him a jumper – providing he pays for the wool.

If this gives Len a heroic disposition is debatable since it does not match the traditional image of a hero.This observation leads to a more profound finding by Sanderson, namely that “The question of why some people act badly and others don’t is not really about good and bad people. By placing the stoning scene relatively early in the play, before the interval, Bond forces his audiences to appreciate the extent to which they collude in the devaluation of humanity. Man’s natural aggression is referenced in Saved, for example when Barry tells his mates of his experiences “In the jungle. And with all that, Len is still enraptured to his day-dream of violence created second-hand from other men’s experiences.

On the night of the attack, Pam drugged the baby to sleep using Anadins (UK brand of painkiller) and we also learn that the child already had pneumonia. In January 1995, it produced Sarah Kane’s infamous Blasted, which features explicit scenes of rape, suicide and cannibal­ism.

Is this Bond’s way of communicating that violence equals masculinity, at least for those who do not participate themselves? Of these four, we may dismiss numbers one (confusion) and three (social norms) without hesitation as they do not apply to Len’s situation.