Exit Theatre Co-op plan performed Restoration by Edward Bond at the Charles Cryer Theatre in Wallington in March 2004.

Originally staged in London in 1981 'Restoration' is set in eighteenth-century England: a world of cruelty, injustice and iron privilege. Lord Are is forced by poverty into an unwanted marriage with the daughter of a wealthy mineowner. One morning, during breakfast, he commits a bizarre and fatal crime. He seeks to pin responsibility for it on his guileless, illiterate footman, Bob Hedges. A battle ensues between Bob's black, justice-hungry wife and the fortified privilege of the ruling classes.

"Edward Bond's Restoration towers like a colossus...its stylistic wit, moral complexity and theatrical force are of the kind one associates with classic drama" - Michael Billington, Guardian

"Bond's great gift as a comic moralist makes Lord Are condemn himself without sacrificing a scintilla of wit. Bond takes the Restoration style, enters it and turns it against itself" Robert Cushman, Observer

Born in Holloway, London in 1934, Edward Bond is often called the Marxist dramatist. He uses both realism and epic theatre to express his rather grim vision of society and human nature. This play is currently one of the options on the A-Level Syllabus.