Writing a book of this kind about a living, and still very productive, writer has its particular pleasures and problems. One of the problems is that of writing a concluding chapter. This study looks at Bond's plays up to At the Inland Sea: yet the next play to appear may throw all of his previous work into a radically new light. So any conclusions need to be acknowledged as even more temporary and provisional than most critical conclusions. With this in mind, I would like to make four main points.

The first is to emphasize the interrelatedness of Bond's plays. The intertextuality of his work goes far beyond the simple fact that he rewrites Lear, or even Narrow Road. I have tried to suggest in this study how certain themes, images and characters recur throughout Bond's work, so that Scopey turns into Len, Hecuba and Ismene become the Woman and her Daughter in Coffee, the image of the threatened child or the child-bundle haunts the plays from Saved onwards, the Palermo improvisation is used and re-used in The War Plays, and so on. Bond's plays continually reflect each other in their facets, and illuminate each other. It is easy to misread this as narrowness of vision, or as the result of a style that has become mannered, rather than distinctive. But this is to miss the point. Bond's plays comprise in effect one long, and as yet unfinished, poem. It is true that, despite the great variety of theatrical modes, genres and styles which he employs, Bond's plays are, in a sense, all telling the same story. But it is a story so big and so important that it encompasses a multitude of other narratives: it is the story of what it costs to find our humanity.

On this theme – and this is the second point of the conclusion – Bond is a formidable polemicist, but he is also a superb craftsman. He uses the stage, and occasionally the screen, as a complex, focused and immediate form of communication.