Staging the Bad Old Days

Abstract

This chapter will explore how Edward Bond’s Early Morning, and comparable works of theatre and performance from 1968 on, presented the Victorians as a ‘dead hand’, preventing society from progressing. The transformations for which these works seem to agitate, leading to a more enlightened, rational and equal future, had with hindsight begun to stall in this period. By the late 1960s a crisis of modernity had begun to take hold that led to an ever-growing fascination — a grieving, even — for the Victorians. The notion that theirs were exclusively the bad old days, to be subjected to the confident indictments of modernity, could no longer hold.