Edward Bond, blazingly original British playwright, dies aged 89

Death announced of writer whose searing and controversial plays included Saved and Early Morning

• Michael Billington on Edward Bond: a phenomenal talent who upturned theatre

Edward Bond, the theatrical firebrand who blew up his own career with his refusal to compromise his scorching poetic vision, died on Sunday aged 89. The death of the playwright, known for Saved, Lear and Bingo, was confirmed by the agency Casarotto Ramsay and Associates.

“I write of the rape of a corpse with a beer bottle to bring back some dignity to our theatre,” wrote Bond in a programme note to his 2016 play Dea, a retelling of Medea, which piled incest and necrophilia on to the myth’s more familiar crime of infanticide. Typical of his later career, its world premiere was not at a major institution, but at the embattled Secombe theatre, in the south London suburb of Sutton, which closed weeks later.