In a much-quoted letter, written in 1977, Edward Bond said

When Simon Trussler wrote the monograph on Edward Bond which appeared in the previous series of Writers and their Work, Bond had only just moved beyond that first ‘span of plays’. Trussler was writing in the early seventies, by which time Bond was already recognized as a dramatist of major importance, and the last play which he includes is Bingo (1976). This current volume aims to update the story, to suggest how far Bond has come, and on what roads, since he discovered that The Sea was not, after all, the end of his life's work. Bond's career as a theatre writer now encompasses a period of about forty years, from his earliest apprentice pieces to the present day, and an essential feature of that career has been Bond's continual theatrical experimentation.

This experimentation has been of two kinds. On the one hand there is a great diversity of technique from one of Bond's plays to the next. Bond's theatre covers a wide range of styles, genres and settings. He moves from working-class social realism to surrealist comedy, from the large-scale epic to the tightly controlled, intimate drama of family life. He writes plays with contemporary settings, futuristic settings, period settings, and fantasy settings. He embraces and subverts mythic structures, and he writes boardroom dramas about the workings of the business world. Equally importantly, though, within any given play it is possible to see the same inquiring, exploratory mind at work. With each new style or genre which he inhabits, he does so with a sense of exploring it, of testing its limits, often of quarrelling with it.