In the beginning was the.......Egg!

A little bit of background about the play.

2003 - As the inevitable descent into the 2nd Gulf War began and as 2 million people marched in protest through London, it was obvious that Iraq was the major world political fault line of the epoch. To this end I had been researching the devastating, purposeful and morally obscene Western sanctions policy imposed on Iraq throughout the 1990s, a policy which had reduced ordinary Iraqis to destitution and led to 100s of thousands of unnecessary deaths through malnutrition, diarrhoea, cancer and the like due to medical and food shortages, the lack of sanitation and the uranium-cased armoury that had been left lying around Iraq after the 1st Gulf War.

One particular day I went to my bed with a splitting headache only to find that instead of rest a story and a plot about 'a boy who dropped an egg on the world' unfolded in my mind's eye. More than happy to have received this 'gift' and despite my troubling headache I jumped out of bed and quick as I could scribbled down everything that had presented itself to me - the boy, the 'mad woman', the two lazy intellectuals, the waiter.

Over the last four years the story's plot has remained essentially as it was on that day, though the American visitor came later. In the meantime I have attempted to make use of two parts of our theatre heritage. Firstly Greek tragedy, something of its intensity, its violence. And secondly, though more paramount, something of the medieval 'mystery' plays that swept through Western Europe before being curtailed and superseded by the bourgeois theatre of the Elizabethan era. These plays were religious morality plays, in which a battle between good and evil, the Devil and Christ or God was played out from familiar biblical situations, though in ways that were at times critically observant of contemporary social hypocrisies. It struck me that this tradition was one that lent itself to the current situation in the Middle East and to the telling of my fable.

So there you have it, a 21st centuary 'mystery' play, a morality tale of good and evil. I hope that something conceived in pain may give some pleasure - hope you like it!

Julian Bond