Bond's war plays are divided into three parts: Red black and ignorant, The Tin Can People and Great Peace. Edward Bond was born in 1934 and you cannot separate his war plays from the contemporary environment at their time of writing: the cold war at the beginning of the 1980s and the nuclear threat that was present in everyone's mind. The issue was such that Bond himself justified his choice of subject by stating that nuclear destruction was, at that time, the only possible subject for art.

The first of the three plays, Red black and ignorant is the prologue: it centres on a child, burnt to death in the nuclear global bombings, who comes from the future to accuse the society of his audience of his murder. The Tin Can People takes place in a post-nuclear desert, inside a community of survivors who are convinced, due to the fact they have all they require to meet their needs for centuries and therefore do not have to work, that they are living in paradise, until they are decimated by an epidemic following the arrival of a stranger.