Edward Bond, an English dramatist whose plays – uncompromising and often shocking, with searing scenes of sex, violence and urban savagery – helped spur the abolition of theater censorship in Britain and brought him a reputation as his country’s most divisive postwar playwright, died March 3 at 89.

His death was confirmed by a representative for his talent agency, Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, who said Bond died in London but did not share additional details. Bond had lived for years in Great Wilbraham, a village near Cambridge.

Across more than 50 plays and additional libretti for operas and ballets, Bond explored the rage and brutality that he saw as an essential part of the human condition. “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners,” he declared.

His plays were lean and spare, filled with anguish and extended silences – he said he wanted to draw out the pauses to the point that they became “painful” for the audience – as well as a touch of the grotesque. Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported that when a revival of his drama “Lear” was staged at the Barbican in the early 1980s, an ambulance service “was on permanent standby,” ready to help audience members who fainted during a scene in which the title character’s eyeballs are sucked out by a machine.

To detractors, Bond was too much a polemicist, focused more on expressing his left-wing political views than exploring the subtleties of human behavior. But even critics acknowledged the fearlessness of plays like “Lear” (1971), a reinterpretation of the Shakespeare tragedy, and “Bingo” (1973), in which he used the Bard as his central character, imagining an elderly and suicidal Shakespeare (variously played by John Gielgud and Patrick Stewart) siding with landowners against the poor.

“No British dramatist polarizes his countrymen as much as Edward Bond,” English theater critic Benedict Nightingale wrote in a 2001 New York Times profile. “One view is that he is an unholy terror: unrelenting in his doctrinaire socialism, harsh in his dealings with people and disconcertingly fond of ultraviolent effects in his plays. The other is that he is a secular saint: a man of unflinching integrity in a world of shoddy compromise.”

Away from the stage, Bond was also a poet who urged audiences to “Leave the theatre hungry/ For change”; an essayist who dashed off gnomic analysis in one paragraph (“Shakespeare’s silence is a Brechtian Lehrstück”) and pithy insight in the next (“Great tragedy is the cry of ‘Eureka!’ uttered in pain”); and a screenwriter who shared an Oscar nomination for his first film project, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s existential mystery “Blow-Up” (1966), which featured his English-language dialogue.

Bond remained best known for early plays like “Saved” (1965), an incendiary drama that played a central role in the repeal of British stage censorship.

Mounted by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the play examined violence and repression in a working-class section of the city and met with the ire of the Lord Chamberlain, a royal office that had presided over British theater for more than 200 years, deciding which plays could be granted a license for performance.

The censor requested numerous cuts, including the removal of the play’s pivotal scene, in which a group of young hoodlums torment a baby in a carriage (“Might as well enjoy ourselves”) and finally stone the infant to death.

Bond held firm. “It’s not documentary. It’s a metaphor,” he said decades later, discussing the baby carriage scene before a 2011 revival at the Lyric Hammersmith. “If you oppress the poorest people, if you bully the weakest people, they will search out those weaker than them to bully and oppress.”

With backing from director William Gaskill and help from a legal loophole, the show went on. The Royal Court temporarily branded itself a private club, mounting the play for “members” only. The production was far from ordinary, Bond recalled: Plainclothes police officers visited the theater, checking to see whether the venue was living up to its billing as a club, and fistfights broke out in the auditorium.

The squabbling extended to critics, who argued over the play’s artistic merits, while prosecutors sought to shut down the production over the objections of champions including Laurence Olivier, the actor and director. In a public letter to the Observer newspaper, he argued that “Saved” was a play “for grown-ups, and the grown-ups of this country should have the courage to look at it.”

That argument didn’t hold up in a London magistrates’ court, which convicted and fined the theater’s management in 1966. But the case spurred a parliamentary review of the censorship system, just as Bond and the Royal Court launched his next play, the surrealist farce “Early Morning,” which involved an unexpected pair of lesbian lovers, Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale (played by Moira Redmond and Marianne Faithfull).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Early Morning” was blocked by the Lord Chamberlain’s office – becoming the last play to be banned before the passage of the 1968 Theatres Act, which abolished stage censorship.

The Royal Court celebrated by organizing a full season of Bond plays: “Saved,” “Early Morning” and “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” a political satire set in Edo-period Japan.

“Democracy is not just freedom of thought. It is freedom of imagination,” Bond later wrote, reflecting on the link between art and politics, and the difference he saw between mainstream theater and his own work.

“Democracy and theatre always go together,” he added. “When one is corrupt the other is corrupt. The imperative of Greek drama was: know yourself. Ours is: do not! TV, press, pop culture – all exist to make money, not to seek truth.”

Thomas Edward Bond was born in the Holloway district of North London on July 18, 1934. His parents were laborers from the East of England who came to London during the Depression in search of work.

Bond was evacuated to the countryside during World War II but was still present during bombings of the city, an experience that introduced him to the violence and terror that later pervaded his work. He dropped out of school at 15, worked in factories and offices, and served for two years in the British army, stationed in Vienna.

Around that same time, he began writing plays. He had been fascinated by the theater ever since he was 14, when he saw Donald Wolfit star in a London production of “Macbeth.” “It was as if I’d heard my native tongue being used properly for the first time,” he recalled, according to the Times of London.

Bond began writing for the newly founded English Stage Company, which mounted his first performed play, “The Pope’s Wedding,” in 1962. His next play was “Saved,” which brought him notoriety and led him to be recruited to work on the dialogue in “Blow-Up,” about a fashion photographer who unwittingly takes pictures of a murder. (The screenplay was co-written by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, loosely based on a short story by Julio Cortázar.)

Over the next few years, Bond worked on the screenplays of a half-dozen feature films, including the Vladimir Nabokov adaptation “Laughter in the Dark” (1969), director Nicolas Roeg’s Australian survival epic “Walkabout” (1971), and the historical drama “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1971), which chronicled the last years of the Russian royal family and received an Oscar nomination for best picture.

For the most part he focused on theater, honing a new comic style in “The Sea” (1973), exploring the life of 19th-century poet John Clare in “The Fool” (1975), and parodying the old-fashioned comedy of manners in “Restoration” (1981), which he staged himself at the Royal Court.

Bond increasingly branched into directing, at times with disastrous results. He publicly feuded with the Royal Court’s longtime artistic director, Max Stafford-Clark, who called him “the most difficult person I have worked with in 40 years”; lambasted the National Theatre, which he said was “run like a biscuit factory”; and walked out on the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1985, while attempting to direct his dystopian trilogy “The War Plays.”

Late in his career, he worked primarily with Big Brum, a Birmingham theater-in-education group for which he wrote at least nine plays. He also found increasing recognition abroad, notably in France and Germany. In the United States, his play “Narrow Road to the Deep North” had a brief run on Broadway in 1972; he received an Obie Award in 1976 for Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of “Bingo.”

Bond was married for nearly 50 years to Elisabeth Pablé, with whom he translated “Spring Awakening” and other plays by Frank Wedekind. She died in 2017. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

While his persona was that of a contentious writer fond of doom and gloom, friends and colleagues said that Bond could also be mischievous and warm, with peacocks in his garden and light and color filling the upper floor of his country cottage. His play “Saved,” for all its violence, ended with what Bond described as an “almost irresponsibly optimistic” ending, with a character repairing a broken chair.

“In the end, you cannot despair,” he told the Guardian in 2008. “If you’re going to despair, stop writing. If my plays are staged and acted in the way in which they are written, what comes across is a colossal affirmation of life.”

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