to a parody of an Edward Bond play." Conversely, Mark Taylor of The Independent wrote that "as its plot takes the path of least resistance between one primal convulsion after another, this starkly eloquent, theatrically knowing play stretches credulity to snapping point. [...] It's no wonder that the tone of Adam Spreadbury-Maher's unsparing, production teeters uncertainly at times between seriousness and melodramatic spoof." Also, Ian Shuttleworth of Financial Times panned the first 20 minutes of the latter play as "a parody of the work of Edward Bond" and the rest of the play as "more of the same [...] this is apparently part of a much longer work (be afraid, be very afraid) examining the inadequacy of modern drama. But it does not examine this; nor does it act as a moral conscience, indict our complacency or anything of that ilk." The Lyric Hammersmith presented the first London production of Bond's Saved for 27 years in autumn 2011 in a production by the venue's Artistic Director Sean Holmes. 2012 saw two new plays performed by Big Brum Theatre in Education Company; The Broken Bowl and The Edge. Both of these plays were filmed and made available online. In 2014 Big Brum Theatre in Education Company presented its tenth new Bond play, The Angry Roads. His 2016 play Dea was panned in The Stage and The Times, with Dominic Maxwell of the latter publication referring to it as "awful". Conversely, Tom Bolton of Londonist argued, "Dea is not just a shock-fest — the play is a deep, poetic, complex investigation of the condition of 21st century society." In 2013 he accepted an honorary doctorate in letters from Newman University, Birmingham. He is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. Publications Since the early 1970s, Bond has been conspicuous as the first dramatist since George Bernard Shaw to produce long, serious prose prefaces to his plays. These contain the author's meditations on capitalism, violence, technology, post-modernism and imagination and develop a comprehensive theory on the use and means of drama. Nine volumes of his Collected Plays, including the prefaces, are available from the UK publisher Methuen. In 1999 he published The Hidden Plot, a collection of writings on theatre and the meaning of drama. He has published two volumes from his notebooks and four volumes of letters. His Collected Poems was published in 1987. Contribution to the cinema In the late