Edward Bond is one of the great Britsih playwrights of the
twentieth/twenty-first centuries. In 1965 his grim portrait of urban
violence, Saved, in which a baby is stoned in its pram, aroused much
admiration as well as a ban from the Lord Chamberlain. His provocative
plays [including Early Morning (1969), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), The
Fool (1975), Restoration (1981), Summer (1982), The War Plays (1985)
and Olly's Prison (1992)] continue to arouse extreme responses from
critics and audiences.

Restoration is set in eighteenth-century England: a world of
cruelty, injustice and iron privilege. Lord Are is forced by poverty
into an unwanted marriage with the daughter of a wealthy mineowner. One
morning, during breakfast, he commits a bizarre and fatal crime. He
seeks to pin responsibility for it on his guileless, illiterate
footman, Bob Hedges. A battle ensues between Bob's black,
justice-hungry wife and the fortified privilege of the ruling classes.

This is a new programme text edition of the play with minor
revisions to the original text and produced for the tour by Oxford
Staeg Company.