A playwright's task is to stun an audience awake, to make it see what life forces it to forget. Edward Bond is one of the few English playwrights with the cunning and craft to meet this challenge. He is obsessed with man's death-dealing in a society whose myths of justice and fair play make it numb to its own brutality. Bond's sense of outrage has turned him, at times, into the Ancient Marineer of the English stage, buttonholing his audience and hectoring it with gruesome and generalised images of suffering (Lear, Bingo). But in his superb new play, The Fool: Scenes of Bread and Love, Bond attains a new theatrical maturity. Luring his audience into the robust and violent rural world of John Clare, the farm labourer turned poet, at the beginning of England's industrialisation in 1815, Bond creates a pageant of exploitation which demonstrates how imagination as well...