Saved (Modern Classics)

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People like Pam and Fred show no qualms when transgressing the rules of society and they, just like Len, are products of working-class backgrounds. Of these four, we may dismiss numbers one (confusion) and three (social norms) without hesitation as they do not apply to Len’s situation.

Under such circumstances, it is possible that Len’s subconscious deliberations on whether to intervene and stop the men are tilted firmly towards inaction, not exclusively out of loyalty to his peers but as the best for all concerned! It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it.

The play is rarely revived, though it has been described as "one of the great modern plays" [7] and its theme of social disenfranchisement is seen by Bond as very relevant to the present day. Pickup points out that the early 1960s had introduced the " theatre of cruelty" to Britain, and "the notion that theatre was going to get down and dirty". On the other hand, the play interested the radicals; John Elsom, writing in his book Post War British Theatre Criticism, appreciated “the realism of Bond’s writing, his superb evocation of a flat, arid, hopeless and deprived social life in South London [which] compelled everybody who saw the play to recognise that atrocities were not confined to fascist camps… but took place in supposedly civilised countries as well”. Later still, they are checking that there are no other witnesses, and working themselves up into the mood in which to give vent to their violent capacity: “Reckon it’s all right?

He may be exceptionally docile, and the threshold required for him to retaliate may be unusually high, for example, only in self-defence. When it was performed to large private audiences, the Lord Chamberlain decided to prosecute those who were involved in the production of the play. He uses the analogy of a dog: “A dog has a capacity to swim the first time it goes into water, but it has no need to swim because it has no need to go into water. If Len is a good person, then surely, we may admire him or view his characterization as a paragon of the model citizen!

They tend to have high self-esteem and to feel confident about their own judgment, values, and ability” (211).

Every time he finds himself in a situation that could lead to aggressiveness, he simply subdues or represses this impulse. What Bond’s play did was lift the physical horrors of Greek tragedy and, much later, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and prove that they had a place on the contempo­rary stage. He had seen bored, neglected kids in nearby Battersea park hurling stones at squirrels: from there to killing the baby, he argues, takes "only one little leap of the imagination".One might also interpret Bond’s quote as meaning that Len does not look away from the ugliness of his community whilst he nonetheless continues to turn the other cheek meaning that he shuns violence and does not seek retribution of any kind. The sacrifice is not an offering but simply the means by which an unusual, perverted level of aggression is dissipated.