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Martin Crimp

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Martin Crimp (born February 14, 1956, Dartford, Kent, Great Britain) is a British playwright.

Sometimes described as a practitioner of the in-yer-face school of contemporary British theatre, though this is a label he rejects , Crimp is notable for the astringency of his dialogue, a tone of emotional detachment, a bleak view of human relationships — none of his characters experience love or joy -- and latterly, a concern for theatrical form and language rather than an interest in narrative. Before establishing himself as a playwright, he put together An Anatomy, a collection of short stories, and also wrote a novel Still Early Days.

Career

His first six plays were performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. As he told Marsha Hanlon in an interview for the Orange Tree appeal brochure in 1991: "When the Orange Tree ran a workshop for local writers [in September 1981], I was invited to take part, The carrot was the chance of a lunchtime production, so I wrote Living Remains and the Orange Tree staged it — my first-ever produced play! I was so excited that I didn't think about the space where it was performed [then a room above a pub], but now I realise that the Orange Tree's intimacy and simplicity provided an extra layer of excitement."

Seven of his plays, and his second Ionesco translation have also been presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where he became writer-in-residence in 1997. His plays are now frequently performed in Europe. He has also been an assiduous translator of European texts.

Possibly his most highly-regarded, and certainly his boldest and most innovative play is Attempts on Her Life, first performed at the Royal Court in 1997 and subsequently translated into twenty languages.

In this work, none of the lines are assigned to a particular character, nor does Crimp specify how many actors should perform the piece. In seventeen apparently disconnected scenes, groups of people give mutually contradictory descriptions of an absent protagonist, a woman talked of as if she were, variously, a terrorist, the daughter of grieving parents, an artist and a new car. This deliberately fragmented work challenges an audience to re-define its notion of what constitutes a 'play' and might seem to question whether someone has any existence beyond the models we construct.

Bibliography

Plays

  • Love Games (co-written with Howard Curtis, Orange Tree Theatre lunchtime, 9 April-1 May 1982)
  • Living Remains (Orange Tree lunchtime, 9-25 July 1982)
  • Four Attempted Acts (Orange Tree 1984)
  • A Variety of Death-Defying Acts (Orange Tree 1985)
  • Definitely the Bahamas, "a group of three plays for consecutive performance" also including A Kind of Arden and The Spanish Girls (Orange Tree 1987)
  • Dealing with Clair (Orange Tree 1988)
  • Play with Repeats (Orange Tree 1989)
  • No One Sees the Video (Royal Court, Theatre Upstairs 1990)
  • Getting Attention (Royal Court, Theatre Upstairs 1991)
  • The Treatment (Royal Court 1993)
  • Attempts on Her Life (Royal Court 1997)
  • The Country (Royal Court 2000)
  • Face to the Wall (Royal Court 2002)
  • Cruel and Tender (Young Vic 2004)
  • Fewer Emergencies (Royal Court, Theatre Upstairs 2005)
  • The City (Royal Court, Jerwood Theatre Downstairs 2008)

Translations

References

  • Theatre Record and its annual Indexes
  • Sierz, Aleks The Theatre of Martin Crimp, Methuen (2007) ISBN 0413775887.
  • Devine, Harriet Looking Back, Faber (2006) ISBN 0413775887 .
  • Edgar, David Each Scene for Itself, London Review of Books 4 March 1999

External links



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