Helping to answer the eternal question: to go or not to go.

This is certainly not one to take the kids to. Edward Bond’s new play, There Will Be More, had its world premiere at the Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn last week, directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher. The play starts with a mother killing her children and closes with incest. And there are precious few laughs in between.

Dea, played by Helen Bang, is the mother who silently and chillingly murders her two babies; the rest of the play examines the aftermath of these events, 18 years later. In Bond’s world, violence breeds violence. Dea’s husband, Johnson, played by Stephen Billington, is an up-tight military captain whose violent day job bleeds into his dysfunctional family life. There are everywhere echoes of the Greek tragedies, from Oedipus who sleeps with his mother, to Medea who murders her children (hence the name “Dea”). There Will Be More is Bond’s attempt to write an ancient tragedy for the modern age.

As the “wicked” mother, Helen Bang is initially chilling, silently applying her make-up before smothering her sons. The second Act, however, sees her transformed into an entirely reasonable woman before returning to apparent madness for the third. Bond’s play is all about how we define madness but the point is an age-old one and he adds little to it. Johnson, the militant military husband is played by a staunch Stephen Billington who expresses love through violence and imprisonment. Billington admirably manages to summon up a slither of sympathy from the audience for the repulsive soldier, by blurring the lines between right and wrong, madness and insanity.

Timothy O’Hara (who also played the lead in The Pope’s Wedding as part of the Cock Tavern’s Edward Bond season) plays Dea and Johnson’s son, Oliver. He is vulnerable, innocent but stained by the events in his parents’ past.

This is truly car-crash theatre: the events are horrific but the audience cannot look away. Spreadbury-Maher’s production does not shy away from the raw violence: the set is minimal and the only soundtrack is the audience’s gasps.

Bond’s writing goes to the darkest places you can imagine and then scuttles into the shadows. This level of violence on stage is hard to justify – the original Oedipus story is no less harrowing for the worst violence taking place off stage. Very little actually happens in this play after the first 20 minutes and the play’s structure is incoherent. Bond is trying too hard to shock and ends up blunting his political pen.