&lt;div class=&quot;track&quot;&gt;&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.22.2/51713?ns=guardian&amp;pageName=Saved%3B+The+Phoenix+of+Madrid%3B+Iphigenia+*+review%3AArticle%3A1648043&amp;ch=Stage&amp;c3=Obs&amp;c4=Edward+Bond+%28Playwright%29%2CTheatre%2CStage%2CCulture%2CSarah+Kane+%28Playwright%29%2CMike+Leigh+%28Film%29&amp;c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CFilm+Reviews%2CTheatre&amp;c6=Susannah+Clapp&amp;c7=11-Oct-14&amp;c8=1648043&amp;c9=Article&amp;c10=Review&amp;c11=Stage&amp;c13=&amp;c25=&amp;c30=content&amp;h2=GU%2FStage%2FEdward+Bond&quot; width=&quot;1&quot; height=&quot;1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;p class=&quot;standfirst&quot;&gt;Lyric Hammersmith, London; Theatre Royal Bath&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;People go to &lt;strong&gt;Saved &lt;/strong&gt;thinking they know what they will see. They&#039;ve been told often enough. A baby is stoned to death in a park by a group of youths; a middle-aged woman has her stocking provocatively darned (she&#039;s inside it: &#039;You watch where yer pokin&#039;) by her daughter&#039;s young admirer. These are the scenes that caused Edward Bond&#039;s play to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2003/apr/23/theatre.samanthaellis&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1965&lt;/a&gt;; these are the scenes that have made it famous.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yet in Sean Holmes&#039;s superb production, the play looks less simply confrontational and rebarbative than&amp;nbsp;the stoning suggests. It is intricate, far-reaching and believable. Intervening history &ndash; the killing of James Bulger, the Baby P case &ndash; may have added to its credibility, but its real&amp;nbsp;force isn&#039;t adventitious. The horror begins to look inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The action uncurls with a series of terrible small blows. A young mother hears her child crying and can&#039;t face going to see what&#039;s the matter with &quot;it&quot;. The boys begin the torture of the baby as a game and a dare, muttering &quot;Rockabye baby&quot; before spinning the pram between them as if it were a football. The girl returns to her child and wheels away the pram, talking lackadaisically to its contents. She doesn&#039;t know the baby is dead: she doesn&#039;t look under the hood.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Susan Brown is the woman who doesn&#039;t speak to her hubby but screeches to the rest of the world as if willing herself into existence. Michael Feast as her husband is silent and somnolent &ndash; he pops his head round the sitting-room door, notices his daughter screwing a stranger and pops out again. Yet he cuts a loaf of bread as if he were hacking up a murder victim. Lia Saville is the girl whose hopes shrivel, not because her child dies, but because one of the men who killed the baby leaves her. She can summon a dreadful perkiness, but is mostly stunned, lethargic. Every now and then she seems on the point of breakdown: her hands twitch as if she were trying to shake off her skin. Morgan Watkins is the boy who tries to behave decently but embeds himself further into the prevailing despair: he gangles, lopsided with the difficulty of it all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Saved&lt;/em&gt; now looks far more theatrically influential than its controversial reputation might suggest. It has the numbed torpor of Mike Leigh characters (&lt;em&gt;Bleak Moments &lt;/em&gt;was first staged five years later); it has the naked ferocity of Sarah Kane&#039;s &lt;em&gt;Blasted&lt;/em&gt;, which Holmes directed at the Lyric a year ago.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A wild introduction to the play script from Bond ascribes the violence in the play to a loss of &quot;political cohesion&quot; and &quot;social self-respect&quot; among &quot;working people&quot;. He traces this backwards to the war and forwards to the coalition. You can go quite a long way with him on the subject of banks and consumerism and Andy Coulson and yet be staggered by the suggestion &ndash; which he describes as a dramatic paradox &ndash; that the youths kill the baby &quot;to regain their self-respect&quot;. This is an&amp;nbsp;introduction that will be held against him, and from which someone should have, well, saved him. His play is far more persuasive than his explanation. It is a strength of &lt;em&gt;Saved &lt;/em&gt;that it doesn&#039;t supply a sociological critique; it simply presents a picture. With so much persuasive detail that spectators feel implicated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Ustinov Studio is being reborn. Laurence Boswell, its new artistic director, has big plans for the small space. Over the next three years there&amp;nbsp;are to be 18 in-house productions&amp;nbsp;in the 125-seater theatre: these will be of plays unknown to British audiences and will be staged in themed seasons. This should bring an entirely new &ndash; and needed &ndash; dimension&amp;nbsp;to Bath theatre.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;His first season, whose theme is hard to find, is intriguing, if not resounding. Boswell has himself translated &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatreroyal.org.uk/page/3029/The+Phoenix+of+Madrid/203&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Phoenix of Madrid&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Calder&oacute;n de la Barca, the 17th-century Spanish playwright best known for his philosophical drama &lt;em&gt;Life Is a Dream.&lt;/em&gt; He&#039;s done a sparky job with the romantic farce, tweaking up its self-referential modernity &ndash; &quot;It&#039;s as if we are in a play by Calder&oacute;n de la Barca&quot; &ndash; without dropping into geezer-speak. The action &ndash; various bits of ruff chasing after different farthingales &ndash; scampers along, helped by Ti Green&#039;s handsome copper-coloured design: walls slide and open up, much as the plot doubles back on itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The link between this and Goethe&#039;s version of Euripides&#039; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatreroyal.org.uk/page/3029/Iphigenia/204&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Iphigenia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;strong&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;isn&#039;t immediately clear: Goethe admired Calder&oacute;n but, on this showing, doesn&#039;t seem to have been greatly influenced by his style. Still, in Meredith Oakes&#039;s nimble new translation, this is a drama well worth rediscovering, both for the patient (admittedly not very brisk) logic of its debate and for the unexpected manner in which hope pierces the blackness. You don&#039;t expect much joy in a play in which giant meat hooks dangle over an altar, but Iphigenia&#039;s recognition of her brother, and his sloughing off of madness, are radiant moments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Laura Rees, who is rather charmless&amp;nbsp;in &lt;em&gt;The Phoenix of Madrid&lt;/em&gt;, comes into her own here in the title part: she is steady, rational and velvet-toned, like an ideal head girl or recently elected MP. Boswell directs both plays, and choreographs &lt;em&gt;Iphigenia&lt;/em&gt; particularly deftly: nothing is rushed but nothing is static. The space is confined but characters proceed with a stately grandeur of gesture. As if it were the Greeks not the Romans who belonged to Bath.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;related&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;&quot;&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/edwardbond&quot;&gt;Edward Bond&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatre&quot;&gt;Theatre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/kane&quot;&gt;Sarah Kane&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/mikeleigh&quot;&gt;Mike Leigh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;author&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/susannahclapp&quot;&gt;Susannah Clapp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;terms&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk&quot;&gt;guardian.co.uk&lt;/a&gt; &amp;copy; 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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