Saved (Modern Classics)

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However, the best example comes when Harry explains to Len how killing can be seen in a positive light – “Yer never killed yer man. I knew there was no baby in the pram, just as I could see there were no stones in the actors’ hands. Just like Bond, Freud draws our attention away from the act of violence but then focuses on discovering the root cause and potential effects of the violence. Costa spoke with Tony Selby who played the role of Fred in the original production of Saved and who gave the following interpretation of the play – “Saved is about ignoring young life. One often defines Len by what he is not rather than what he is, and this is continually frustrating to an audience.

You see that in the very first scene in which Pam brings a young man, Len, back to her south London home for no other purpose than a quick shag on the sofa. Civilization pays no heed to all this; it merely prates that the harder it is to obey the more laudable the obedience. A. Darlington in his Daily Telegraph review dated 4th November 1965: “The effect of this scene on me is precisely the opposite of what the author intended me to feel. Violence may be viewed similarly to Mary’s comments on sex because as Freud informs us, “men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment” (24).At first, they act naturally and pay no attention to anyone else, as they behave no more violently than to express a little verbal bravado: “And down will come baby and cradle and tree an’ bash its little brains out an’ Dad’ll scoop ‘em up and use ‘em for bait”. One manner of interpreting Bond’s assertion that an attack on human values is a show of human value, is to look at the violence of the play. He acted as a bystander during the attack but rather than imagine himself later as the moral rebel who intervened, he fanaticizes instead on how the killer felt in the moment.

It remains a horrifying scene that captures all too accurately the escalating rhythm of violence and the imaginative barrenness of youths who assume that babies are simply animals devoid of feeling. One may cite several key examples, starting with Fred’s sexual innuendo to Pam when she is on a day out with Len who laughs off Fred’s comments, saying, “Yer’ll be in the splash in a minute” (Bond 27). The tragic scene highlights the level of neglect and how the ills of society fall hard upon a defenceless child without their natural protector of a loving parent. Pam finally realises that Fred does not love her, and Len offers himself as a substitute, although she does not respond. Freud considers “The irresistibility of perverted impulses” (9) under which we may categorize the child murder depicted in Saved.The shock of the moment when the child is killed is imbued with the adrenalin of the perpetrators, but later, the cold responses from central characters indicate an eerie moral deficiency. Please note that the play script is not reader-friendly since much of the dialogue involves short, often mundane exchanges. Len’s presence and lack of any action allows us to categorize him, with all the authoritative backing of a dictionary definition, as a bystander. The three young men were trying to get to grips with a troubling scene in which they lark about with a baby in its pram, poking it, pulling off its nappy, goading each other until they stone it to death.

From his 1966 appendix to the play: “Clearly the stoning to death of a baby in a London park is a typical English understatement. Mary, who has the experience of being a mother, knows that it is wrong to ignore the baby and, indeed, feels a little guilty about the whole affair. Bond presents Len as an agent of change, of progression, and this matches the biblical instruction to leave grievances in the past and move forward (turn the other cheek).This is going to be the worst government we've had since the 1930s: they're not in control of what they're doing, and when that happens people become vicious. Of course, we know nothing about the baby – we do not see it, we do not know its name, we do not know if it’s a boy or a girl; as far as its family is concerned, it might as well not exist. If this gives Len a heroic disposition is debatable since it does not match the traditional image of a hero.