Edward Bond's new play [Summer: A European Play] … is set in an unnamed country which seems to be Yugoslavia; a sunny Mediterranean land with a growing tourist industry, occupied by the Germans during the war and subject to a social revolution after it. Three middle-aged survivors of that distant time confront the past and each other….

When Bond is producing his best work, as in this play, his debt to Shakespeare is both obvious and enriching. Apart from his use of poetic imagery, he gives us a sense of action taking place at several levels and, perhaps most important of all, that a tension between irreconcilable opposites is of the very essence of drama. Tensions are manifold: between order and anarchy, justice and mercy, and—in this particular play—between life and death, light and dark: Marthe is dying, and tells us that it is death which gives...