A deprived society offers no future and bad parenting offers no protection and bad governments don’t care. Yes, he fully meets the criteria of a bystander but in addition we learn that this does not make him a bad person, that subconscious factors influence his decision not to intervene during the attack, and ultimately, that a normally altruistic person may fail to help at the most crucial moment even with the most vulnerable of victims. The tragic scene highlights the level of neglect and how the ills of society fall hard upon a defenceless child without their natural protector of a loving parent. Len’s interest and his continual references to the child as ‘it’ impel us to reconsider his character.

Critics had already witnessed, in 1962, the death of a child at the hands of teenage delinquents in Infanticide in the House of Fred Ginger, also staged by Gaskill. The two instinctual urges that are shown prominently in Saved are the propensities for man to be violent and to desire sex. Yet, such an interpretation is a mismatch with the playwright’s frequently shown sympathy for the working classes. Over the course of one scene, Pam fights with Len and with her mother Mary while the neglected baby cries continually. For instance, when Mary talks to Len about getting a new girlfriend, and by extension, having sex, she says “It’s in every man.The second contains Bond’s philosophy of violence and acts as a complement to the play, which itself is an attempt to explain the nature of violence through the power of drama.

Len stands by, doing nothing, and it is as though the child’s life had already been lost and therefore no hope remained to save it. When cocky young Fred appears, delivering lines packed with sexual innuendo, Pam recognises a fellow being only interested in sex, and so her relationship with Len, as far as she is concerned, is almost instantly over. On the other hand, the play interested the radicals; John Elsom, writing in his book Post War British Theatre Criticism, appreciated “the realism of Bond’s writing, his superb evocation of a flat, arid, hopeless and deprived social life in South London [which] compelled everybody who saw the play to recognise that atrocities were not confined to fascist camps… but took place in supposedly civilised countries as well”.They simply attack the child because that is what society expects of them – it confirms their identity. Thus the cry for freedom is directed either against particular forms or demands of culture or else against culture itself”. I knew there was no baby in the pram, just as I could see there were no stones in the actors’ hands. Not wanting to be left in charge of the baby, Fred loses his temper with Pam, who in turn becomes angry and leaves the baby with him.