Edward Bond's version of Lear's story embraces myth and reality, war and
politics, to reveal the violence endemic in all unjust societies. He
exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this
false morality as a source of the aggressive tension which must
ultimately destroy that society. In a play in which blindness becomes a
dramatic metaphor for insight, Bond warns that 'it is so easy to
subordinate justice to power, but when this happens power takes on the
dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is really
changed'.