Labour Disputes at York: what a Bundle of joy!

 

I have had the great fortune of working with Alan Dilworth on The Bundle for the past 4 months as an assistant director on the show. It has been an extremely interesting experience as it framed the labour dispute at York University. Just a day after our first full company meeting in November of 2008, the strike ensued. With all members of the cast being graduate students and thus, members of the union, it put the entire company in an extraordinary relationship with the work. Bond is almost a completely political playwright. He dramatizes the ironic disposition of revolutionary conflicts with a highly absolutist perspective. Through dramatizing the analysis rather than just the action, he brings into focus the possibility of constructive social change. How ironic that this year’s production fell in the middle of one of the largest labour disputes of the decade. As TA’s and contract faculty battled for wage increases and better working contracts, the union attempted to rattle the way that profit driven institutions such as York operate and treat their prime resources. 

 

I have had mixed feelings about the strike simply because I feel I cannot see the larger picture; I am too close to the core of the issues to be wholly objective. I support a revolution of the education system and I think it is important to fight for changes that will bring about transformation, but the reality of the world clouds what I believe is actually possible. And by reality I mean the global recession and the capitalist superpowers that have thwarted any notions of a socialist utopia. In The Bundle, Bond attempts to draw out the mystifications of ideology: the clusters of assumptions about the way things are which we all seem to understand as natural and necessary. In Marxist terms, this mystification of ideology is understood through the notion of exploitation. In many ways I feel that as a student I am exploited. I have no right of ownership over the knowledge or production of information that I am ‘buying’ through my tuition. I am paying for the product of learning which is then consumed. I feel that education should not be a product of consumerism; it should be accessible to anyone and everyone. As Basho states, “knowledge must be loved for itself”. Sadly, the strike has not brought about any dramatic social change as of yet, but hopefully it is the start of something larger, something bigger than all of us at York. The way things are is not an absolutist situation, but rather a product of class and power. If we start to question and understand how the system works we can start to gain the power to change it.

 

What I find so interesting about The Bundle is that it is neither realistic nor historical, but rather a kind of universal story or parable that is set in a kind of fabled place. The fictional world allows the analysis to be universal and ageless. Although the play takes place in what happens to be called China, the events apply to no specific revolution. The action can then draw parallels to countless acts of history such as the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution or even the political turmoil surrounding the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The names tend to be Chinese, but all the same, the place is a place where appalling oppression takes place. The play begins with the figure of he 17^th century poet Basho refusing to pick up an abandoned baby by the river. Saving the baby seems to be a kind of paradigm for what one is prepared to do for others in terms of obligation and responsibility. I feel that Bond poses the question: when do the ends justify the means? How much violence can take place before a revolution itself becomes just as oppressive and violent as the regime that was overthrown? As Bond notes in an interview with Karl-Heinz Stoll in 1976:

My plays are not particularly violent, actually. There are often violent things in them, and when they occur, then I depict them as truthfully and honestly as I think one should. But I’m not interested in violence for the sake of violence. Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs. Violence is the problem that has to be dealt with.

 

Finally, in the ending scene of the play the revolutionaries are sitting around their work camp giggling over lunch, demonstrating what a new kind of consciousness could be like. Then, Tuan is discovered in the water, drowned, and the shock of death and fear is brought back into this new world. It seems as though Bond is optimistic about the possibility of change, but he wants to remind us that even through change there is struggle.