life with more cowbell

Edward Bond’s 1965 play Saved, a controversial play for its time, remains so today in its modernized Fringe production. Director Jack Grinhaus sets the play in 1997-99, a period of social and media transition that parallels the period in which the play was written. Television – and now digital media – provides access to sex and violence on a scale not previously seen, and viewers are overwhelmed to the point of numbness by the bombardment of images and information – often violent in nature. Combined with a sense of hopelessness and anomie, we see its effects on society – in youth turned savage. The director’s notes cite the G20 and Vancouver riots. The play presents the murder of a baby – called “it” by the mother and left alone with a pack of young men, one of them possibly the father, who call to mind the wildly transformed boys in Lord of the Flies. 

The bleak, and at times brutal, world portrayed in this slice-of-life piece is not for the faint-hearted. There is no redemption here, and the only reconciliation – if there is any to be had – is a resolution to the cycle of unchangable hopelessness. Grinhaus has assembled a very fine cast of actors, the youths played by York University theatre grads Alex Carter, Bryan Denmore, Josh Dolphin, Tina France, Andrew Loder, Jamie Maczko and Shaina Silver-Baird, and the two parents played by veterans of the stage more recently seen at Alumnae Theatre, John Illingworth and Brenda Somers.

In light of our quick and easy access to violent footage and horrific news stories, one may ask: Why see this play when we see stuff like this every day? Violence itself isn’t the point so much as what it’s doing to our society – especially to our youth. As Grinhaus says in the program notes: “… violence breeds violence.”