ABSTRACT
Red Black and Ignorant is part one of Bond’s War Plays trilogy. ‘TE’ stands for his term ‘Theatre Event’. In Red Black and Ignorant the soldier returns home with his order to kill someone-anyone-in the neighbourhood. His mother represses her revulsion, dresses him in his uniform and sends him to kill her neighbour. The text gives her and her son’s reasons for what they do. They may have other motives in a subtext (perhaps a writer is not always in control of the subtext). Does the son have an Oedipal relation to the father so that already he wants to kill him (as in the end he does) instead of the neighbour? Could it be unconscious guilt that makes him stand as passively as a child being dressed to run an errand?
