the RSC in 1996 when he directed In the Company of Men, but considered this production a failure. He nevertheless regularly accepted revivals and sometimes got involved in these productions, although remaining generally unsatisfied, and he directed workshops for RSC actors with Cicely Berry. Except for two plays written for the BBC in the early 1990s (Olly's Prison and Tuesday), Bond continued writing plays in the knowledge that they would not be staged in Britain except by amateur companies. These conflicts are still highly controversial, and Bond and those with whom he has clashed continue to settle scores in letters, books and interviews. The turning point of the 1980s Nevertheless, in the mid-1980s, Bond's work had a new beginning with the trilogy of The War Plays. Motivated by the threats of the last years of the Cold War and the political activism it provoked in Britain and Europe, Bond had planned to write about nuclear war since the early 1980s. He found a means to do so after testing a storyline with Sicilian students in Palermo. To point to the barbarity of a society which planned to kill the enemy's children to protect their own (that being how he saw the logic of nuclear deterrence), he suggested an improvisation in which a soldier was ordered to kill a child of his community to curb mass starvation. According to Bond, each student who improvised as the soldier refused to kill a foreign child and paradoxically returned home to kill their own sibling instead. He saw in this a deeply rooted force in the individual preserving an innate sense of justice that he theorized as 'Radical Innocence'. Subsequently, he built on this concept a comprehensive theory of drama in its anthropological and social role that he intended to go beyond Brecht's theories on political drama. This discovery also gave him the key to write on nuclear war, not to just to condemn the atrocity of war in a general way but, from a political perspective, questioning public acceptance of it and collaboration with it by ordinary citizens. Between 1984 and 1985 he wrote three plays to meet various requests, which he united as The War Plays. The first, Red Black and Ignorant (written for a Festival dedicated to George Orwell), is a short agit-prop play in which a child, aborted and burnt to death in the nuclear global bombings, comes from the