the play is (rightly) subtitled "a comedy" and was intended as optimistic after the gloomy mood of his previous plays. This is encapsulated by the successful escape of a young and promising couple from this narrow and oppressive society. This play would be the last of Bond's plays that was directed by Gaskill. In 1974 Bond translated Spring Awakening (1891) by the German playwright Frank Wedekind, about the suppression of adolescent sexuality. The play had always been censored or presented with major cuts since its writing, and Bond's was the first translation to restore Wedekind's original text, including its most controversial scenes. Bond then produced two pieces exploring the place of the artist in society. Bingo (1974) portrayed the retired Shakespeare as an exploitative landlord, an impotent yet compassionate witness of social violence, who eventually commits suicide, repeatedly asking himself "Was anything done?". The Fool (1975) reinterprets the life of the rural 19th century poet John Clare. It involves Clare in the Littleport Riots of 1816, and then makes his own poetry the depository of the spirit of this rural rebellion against the growth of modern industrial capitalism. The failure of this historical class war eventually drives him to a madhouse. In 1976 Bingo won the Obie award as Best Off-Broadway play and The Fool was voted best play of the year by Plays and Players. From the 1970s to the mid-1980s: broader scope of practice and political experiments Bond remained a successful playwright in England all through the 1970s, expanding his range of writing and his collaborations. His plays were requested by institutional and community theatres, for premieres and revivals, and he was commissioned to write plays both by renowned institutions and fringe activist companies. For example, in 1976 he wrote, on one hand Stone and A-A-America (pronounced as a sneeze), two agit-prop-style plays, respectively for Gay Sweatshop and the Almost Free Theatre and, on the other, an adaptation of Webster's The White Devil for Michael Lindsay-Hogg to re-open the Old Vic and a libretto for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to open at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden: We Come to the River. (In 1982 the pair collaborated again, less successfully on another opera, The English Cat). Ann Marie Demling wrote that in A-A-America! "Bond borrows cleverly and skillfully from the caricature and dialect of the American tall-tale and folk legend." She found Stone "problematic