Dealing with Clair; The Treatment; The Misanthrope; Attempts on Her Life; The Country; Fewer Emergencies
Martin Crimp is one of the most versatile, creative and aesthetically prolific and challenging playwrights of our time. Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, whom Crimp has identified as one of his major influences and who once declared that his central aim was to make fiction and drama turn away from the well-trodden paths and ‘puny exploits’ of traditional realist form, Crimp has spent his career in search of new forms of aesthetic expression.1 He has produced an impressive oeuvre that includes eleven major plays, four unpublished ones, accomplished stage adaptations, meticulous translations of European playwrights such as Chekhov, Marivaux, Genet, Ionesco and Koltès, as well as two prizewinning radio plays, an unpublished novel, and various other writings.2
Crimp certainly belongs among those writers whose life is their work. Characteristically, he appears to have never really lost an epistemological scepticism about (auto-)biographical truth, an attitude that both implicitly and explicitly permeates Crimp’s entire work.
Whatever I say to you […] you will go away and make a shape from it. That shape will be definitive in the way that the relationship between you and I can never be. […] You will undertake a shaping process… in which I as a person will be misinterpreted.3
Crimp was born in Dartford, Kent, on 14 February 1956. A year later his family moved to York. He read English at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and after graduating moved to Richmond in Surrey. Crimp joined the writers’ group at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond where he became Thames TV Writer-in-Residence in 1988–89. The Orange Tree premiered six of his plays over the next few years, thoroughly absurdist pieces such as Living Remains (1981), Four Attempted Acts (1984), A Variety of Death-Defying Acts (1985), or Definitely the Bahamas (1986) and the popular Dealing with Clair (1988) as well as the more experimental Play with Repeats (1989). The year 1990 marked a major step in Crimp’s career when No One Sees the Video was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. Getting Attention, written before No One Sees the Video, was produced by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1991. A three-week stay in New York City during a Royal Court exchange programme resulted in The Treatment (1993), which was premiered at the Royal Court and directed by Lindsay Posner, winning the John Whiting Award. Crimp then adapted Molière’s The Misanthrope (1996). In 1997 Attempts on Her Life was premiered at the Royal Court. This widely acclaimed play secured him a place among the most challenging experimental playwrights in the world. Other major Royal Court plays include The Country (2000), Fewer Emergencies (2005) and The City (2008).
Dealing with Clair was first performed on 14 October 1988. Since then, it was broadcast by the BBC in 1991, and frequently revived. The sparse plot centres on the estate agent Clair, who is about to sell Mike and Liz Walsum’s suburban house to James, a sophisticated cash buyer. The unexpected offer of cash creates a dilemma for the couple as they have already accepted an offer from an elderly Shropshire couple. They emphasise repeatedly that they intend to ‘behave honourably in this’ (p. 15) yet, of course, they also do not mind cashing in on their luck. Critics have readily agreed that the play is a satire on ‘the state of the market society’, ‘modern manners’, or ‘yuppie moral and emotional bankruptcy’.4 Indeed, Liz and Mike’s greed satirises the practice of gazumping during the house-buying and-selling craze at the end of the 1980s. The comedy of manners, however, is flanked by two major twists of plot that add mystery and thriller elements to the play. Clair, otherwise icily professional and enthusiastic about her job, seems much frailer when she is perceived on her own. A telephone conversation with her mother ends on a rather pensive note: ‘Who knows what I’ll do? Maybe make a killing and just… disappear. (Laughs.) That’s right. Vanish’ (p. 9). Ironically, her remark turns out a proleptic one as, in the second twist of plot, James changes into a sinister character who preys on Clair’s privacy and ultimately, as another rather uncanny telephone call between James and Clair’s mother lets shine through, seems very likely to have murdered her.
Crimp very loosely takes his cue from the case of the British estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, reported missing in 1986, and later declared dead, presumed murdered. The thriller elements of the plot, the satirical debunking of Thatcherite England and the subliminal feeling of betrayal between the married couple, who consider Clair both an object of desire and a threat, produce a lingering Pinteresque air of unease, menace and bad faith that permeates their interaction. The house, itself an object of desire, becomes a central symbol of the perverted, decaying system of ‘Thatcher’s ideology of a property-owning democracy’.5 Ironically, yet quite tellingly, the builder Ashley in a minor scene points out that there is something very wrong with the structure of the house. Symbolically, thus, Crimp acidly asserts that something is indeed rotten in the state of Britain that will sooner rather than later pull the rug from under a nation’s feet: ‘I mean what we’re talking about here is serious timber decay, we’re talking about the structure, you with me?’ (p. 47).
The Treatment was first performed on 15 April 1993 at the Royal Court. The complex play is set in New York City, and it focuses on Anne, a young woman who has left her husband Simon, who has kept her in their home and allegedly taped her mouth to keep her silent. Jennifer and Andrew, a married couple of film producers, have bought Anne’s life story in order to turn it into a major film. They give Anne’s story a ‘treatment’, that is, they construct a marketable plotline. Yet it quickly turns out that the story Anne has to tell is by no means sensational enough in order to be likely to attract a film audience. Accordingly, Jennifer and Andrew hire Clifford, a forgotten playwright, who once had a couple of Broadway hits and who would ‘like to introduce a Shakespearean element’ (p. 325) to Anne’s story. In order to jolly Anne along, Andrew has casual and brutal sex with her, an act that he makes Clifford watch. Anne is shocked and in the course of the play reluctantly witnesses how her ‘story’ gets more and more ‘treated’, that is truncated and adapted to the violent and voyeuristic appeal of mass audiences. In the course of the action, Clifford is dismissed and Anne dropped from the project. In an act of irrational cruelty that is meant to take revenge on his eye-witnessing of her sex with Andrew, Anne makes Simon stab Clifford’s eyes with a silver fork. The fourth act, in which the plot moves one year ahead, shows Anne having returned to Simon. Andrew leaves Jennifer in order to search for Anne, only to find her tied again to a chair with her mouth taped. He does not realise the strange sado-masochistic attraction that complementarily binds Anne and Simon to one another. Jennifer comes to look for Andrew and accidentally shoots Anne dead in the darkness. In the final scene of the play, the blind writer Clifford gets into a taxi steered by a blind taxi driver. The blind leading the blind is an obvious intertextual reference to King Lear, and, quite symbolically, the car and its blind passengers move through Manhattan:
Clifford Where is this? Where are we going?
Driver I’ve no idea, Clifford. (p. 389)
New York City and its ‘labyrinthine strangeness’ become synecdoches of the mediatised city in a play that is Crimp’s relentless satire on the image-producing industry of film business.6 Similar to No One Sees the Video, where the criticism is directed against the simulacra produced by market research, Crimp portrays a Baudrillardian world in which an essence or truth of a life is displaced into a kaleidoscopic myriad of perspectives and shapes, thus emphasising that an excess of technological communication has brought about a proliferation of (virtual) meanings. This impression is enhanced by the contradictory information that Anne herself provides about her life. As Aleks Sierz writes: ‘How can you object to someone’s life being stolen if they insist on giving it away?’7 Here, in Baudrillard’s words, the sign ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum’.8 Andrew amply comments on this condition of hyperreality:
Andrew The words, just the words, brought the emotion into being, and look at me – I have no control at all. Is it because you’re real? We don’t often meet real people here. We ourselves have no memories or stories. No enchantment, Anne. We are the disenchanted. We started out real, but the real-ness has burned out of us. (pp. 351–2)
Stylistically, the play features characteristic elements of Crimp’s dramaturgy: subjectively shaped, surreal imagery; a precise sense of rhythm and atmosphere in the text as commas denote meticulously placed pauses, oblique strokes indicate points of interruption in overlapping dialogue, and brackets, for instance, refer to momentary changes of tone.9 Overlapping dialogues and, as an augmentation of this, simultaneous conversations are indicative of Crimp’s deep distrust of human communication. On the one hand, these scenes, again, function as synecdoches of the informational overkill in a hyperreal world; on the other hand, they are governed by the fact that the rationality that determines the characters’ actions is notably of a purely strategic or instrumental rather than communicative nature.10
Compared to The Treatment and his subsequent plays, Crimp’s virtuosic adaptation of Molière’s classic seems like a playful finger exercise. ‘The Misanthrope,’ Crimp stated in an interview, ‘was written entirely for my own amusement and enjoyment, just to get me out of a kind of black hole – if you like – of writing.’11 While Molière’s plot is set among fops, buffoons and spinsters, Crimp relocates it to a contemporary London scene that focuses on journalists, critics, agents, actors and film producers. Crimp turns Molière’s tragi-comic hero Alceste into an acrimonious, self-righteous playwright and Célimène into Jennifer, a young and attractive, flirtatious, and cocaine-consuming Hollywood actress. In either play Célimène and Jennifer represent anything that both Alceste’s high moral standards and demands would utterly have to despise, and yet they madly fall for. When Alceste in Molière brusquely ridiculed Oronte’s clumsy attempt at verse, Crimp’s Alceste likewise relentlessly attacks the attempt at a play by the notorious critic Covington – a portmanteau word of the names of two of the leading London theatre critics. In Crimp’s play, the major satirical targets of Alceste’s rage are ‘sycophants, compromise, hypocrites, nepotism, betrayal, vested interests’ (p. 109) and particularly the insensitivity of audiences ‘gratefully reacting to yet another tour de force of classic over-acting’(p. 161). A musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber is likened to a ‘natural disaster’ (p. 119), and Alceste can hardly bear thinking what it takes ‘to sit through another play by Stoppard or by David fucking Hare’ (p. 161) – the plotline of Covington’s play, by the way, ironically recalls Hare’s Skylight (1995). The self-righteousness, though, with which Alceste in Crimp’s adaptation carries his contempt forward, makes his ultimate defeat seem deserved. Of course, one is tempted to think, Jennifer must reject his offer to walk out on the people she is surrounded by and desert her career to follow Alceste into the prison-house of country loneliness and isolation.
The best lines of a veritable firework display of delightful and wittily crafted verses, though at times they plunge into doggerel, go to Alceste’s friend John.
John I have to say that this so-called rage
Would make more sense on the seventeenth-century stage.
And surely as a playwright you’re aware
Of sounding like something straight out of Molière. (p. 109)
Somewhat differently from Philinte in Molière, John does neither boundlessly demonstrate the very ideal which Alceste believes he is embodying himself, nor is he Crimp’s mouthpiece. Like Philinte, however, John is able to effect that common-sense compromise which social interaction always entails without losing his inner freedom and independence (as his close friendship to Alceste enduringly proves). Whereas Molière’s Alceste at least touches the tragic dimension of human failure, Crimp’s Alceste is but a mere laughing stock when he leaves his society at the end of the play. Michael Billington is right when he argues that the modern media world which the play satirises is ‘too flimsy to justify the weight of Alceste’s wrath’ and that, quite simply and much different from Molière’s times, ‘nothing vital seems at stake’.12 The Western world, John seems to say, may be corrupt, pretentious, fashion-ridden, or dishonest, but then it is the only world that we inhabit. It is a world without a clear-cut borderline between right and wrong, good and evil, which, in his view, we had better encounter with a pinch of self-irony.
John […] It’s hard to be ‘enraged’
if one is philosophically disengaged.
And the human animal looks far less fearsome
through the prism of postmodernism.
The world’s a mess. Absolutely. We’ve fucked it.
So why not just sit back and deconstruct it? (p. 112)
Attempts on Her Life was originally intended as ‘a kind of grotesque footnote’ to The Treatment.13 Indeed, the plays have elements in common. They share the name of their main protagonist Anne, and one of their central topics is the limits of our comprehending another person to the full. The formal experiment with which Crimp encounters this topic in Attempts, however, is aesthetically so innovative, impressively daring and courageous that it has rightly taken Crimp to new heights of international stardom. Sierz goes as far as to call Attempts ‘the best play of the decade’, and Mary Luckhurst, in an analysis that is otherwise thoroughly critical, argues that the play is ‘the most radically interrogative work in western mainstream theatre since Beckett’.14 Shaun Usher compares the play to the innovation brought about by Pirandello and finds that Crimp ‘goes even farther, doing away with character as such, not to mention a recognisable plot’.15
Crimp prefixes his play with a quotation by Jean Baudrillard, and the paratext neatly sets up our reception: ‘No one will have directly experienced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them’ (p. 198). Stephen Dedalus’s maxim in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that absence is the highest form of presence might also well be preluding form and contents of Attempts. It is impossible to summarise what Crimp has named ‘Seventeen Scenarios for the Theatre’ which ‘redefine the concepts of subject, author, and gender’ and which turn drama and the theatre into phenomenological spaces of perception and fluxus and epistemological as well as even ontological uncertainty.16
Each of these scenarios, in which we encounter messages, elliptic sentences, advertising copy and patter, stage directions, nonsequential, hermetic and also highly poetic clusters of words and collage-like snapshot images, presents seventeen opposing or unrelated outlines for the life of someone called Anne (or Anya, Annie, Anny and Annushka) and in which the ever absent ‘protagonist’ adopts such diverse roles as those of a film heroine, a civil war victim, a megastar, an international terrorist, an artist, a survivalist, a porn star, or even a car or a victim of aliens. Such apparent arbitrariness notwithstanding, each scenario presents us with incoherent, albeit thoroughly recognisable images of everyday life. As minimalist in concept and as carefully crafted as these are, they are reminiscent of the ready-mades of conceptual art, as Clara Escoda Agustí has shown, or of Minimal Art.17 Yet the realm of everyday life that Crimp’s images derive from makes Attempts also thoroughly different from, for instance, Samuel Beckett’s minimalist later works.18 In Scenario 1, audiences and readers face eleven messages on Anne’s answering machine giving contradictory information from which we can but infer contexts which, like leitmotifs, seem to be taken up by other scenarios later on: The lover (?), who is only ‘pretty sure it’s Prague’ he’s calling from; her mother (and a broken family home); somebody telling her that an (explosive?) device is in a small truck; the car dealer wanting her to collect a new vehicle; (death) threats such as ‘We know where you live you fucking bitch. You’re dead, basically’ (p. 204); somebody praising a work (of art?) of hers; and the lover again (?), who imagines a scenario that she might be lying dead on the floor. Scenarios 2, 3 and 17 metafictionally centre on the development of plotlines for film scripts; structurally, the absent plot which we hear developed or ‘treated’ is deflected into discourse or narrative, a strategy which Crimp has employed in The Treatment before and again in other plays after Attempts, but which appears much more radicalised here as there are no more characters but only nameless voices the exact number of which is entirely open.19 This renunciation of teleology and causal coherence stresses the self-reflexive, autopoietic force of the play. The result is a metafictional structure of a complex mise en abyme of ([an-opaque-story-] within-an-opaque-dialogue) that runs nowhere and remains inconclusive. The whole play resembles a collage of disjointed and fragmented images, which in their entirety render Anne a paradoxical presence/absence in a veritable Tower of Babel of discourse.
It is certainly one of the great accomplishments of the play that Crimp succeeds in turning the fragments of his collage of umpteen discursive versions of Anne into a serious meta-biographical statement. In the rhymed Scenario 5 ‘The Camera Loves You’ an amorphous ‘we’ seems to comment on the megastar status of Anne.
We’re talking of a plan to be
OVERWHELMED by the sheer totality
And utterly believable three-dimensionality
THREE DIMENSIONALITY
of all the things that Anne can be
ALL THE THINGS THAT ANNE CAN BE. (p. 223)
On the one hand, this is a satirical debunking of what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ and the postmodern merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated text or textuality-process which results in an overkill, a new depthlessness, and an obsession with mere surface.20 On the other hand, ‘all the things that Anne can be’ means all the things that Anne can be in the eyes of others, the possibilities of fictions, interpretations, and constructions of her life (or of any life in the eyes of others) are limitless. In Scenario 6, ‘Mum and Dad’, in which voices talk about photographs of her from different places, even the deictic reference of the voices makes it impossible to decide if these voices are actually Anne’s parents, or whether these voices merely fictionalise Anne’s parents reasoning as to why she has committed suicide.
They laugh all through next passage:
[…]
She says she’s not a real character, not a real character like you get in a book or on TV, but a lack of character, an absence she calls it, doesn’t she, of character.
An absence of character, whatever that means… (p. 229)
The strange and almost tender poetic beauty of this passage reflects that Anne’s life, her self, her individual ‘I’ is alleged to be seen by herself as a mere projection area. What she says, in fact, is itself but a reflection in a broken mirror as it is embedded in the memories of unknown voices that recall or fictionalise on what Anne’s Mum and Dad remember that she said. Again, what we have in front of us here is an intricate Chinese box, another mise en abyme of <([memory] within memory) within dialogue between obscure voices> and, thus, an impressive structural analogy of the bottomless pit of epistemological nothingness. Biographical truth hence turns out to be a mere chimera as the object of biography is a subject without a kernel, the search for which would resemble Peer Gynt’s absurd peeling of the onion in search for its ideal core. Anne/Annie/Anya/Anny/Annushka are uncannily floating signifiers that have lost their (transcendental) signified. Who Anne is, who anyone is, what a self or what an identity is is ultimately unaccountable, Crimp seems to say. Whoever Anne really is can appear only as a ‘trace’, in Derrida’s phrasing, as a paradoxical presence/absence and as an irreconcilable difference that also inevitably turns any interpretation into a misinterpretation. The ambiguous title of the play itself already exhibits this meta-biographical deconstruction of the self: whoever would even try to pin a life down to an essence or an absolute truth would go way towards murdering it. This epistemological depth renders Attempts on Her Life, both in its groundbreaking form and content, a true and lasting masterpiece of contemporary drama worldwide.
In The Country, which was first performed at the Royal Court on 11 April 2000, Crimp returns into the calmer, even if, it seems to me, more shallow waters of mainstream theatre.21 With an ironic glance back at The Misanthrope it becomes fairly understandable why Jennifer rejects Alceste’s offer of becoming a country wife: Crimp’s countryside is no place of idyll. The Country comprises five scenes that seem loosely connected slices of life, and by degrees a comprehensible plotline unravels. Richard, a GP, and his wife Corinne, both in their forties, have moved to the country with their children, because he is fleeing from his drug addiction. One night, he brings to their home Rebecca, a young American girl he says he has found unconscious by the road. Corinne is suspicious from the start and in a conversation with Rebecca finds out that not only has Rebecca been having an affair with Richard, who has bought her an expensive watch, but also that he has brought her home because she overdosed on drugs that he had given her. Corinne also learns that it was for Rebecca’s sake that they moved to the country in the first place. It further turns out that while Richard was taking care of Rebecca after the overdose he neglected looking after a patient who, as a consequence, died. In the final scene of the play, which is set two months later, Richard and Corinne celebrate her birthday. Richard has bought her a pair of expensive shoes, the high heels of which seem sadly out of place in that vicinity. She tells him that she went to the spot in the woods where Rebecca had overdosed before and that she met Morris, who had found Rebecca’s watch.
The plotline is deliberately left inconclusive since the fate of Rebecca is entirely left open: the watch Morris found might be an indicator that ‘Richard is still meeting her, or it is simply a reminder of her existence’, as Sierz suggests.22 The prevailing atmosphere of an intriguing, creepy menace is generated by such Pinteresque devices as the intrusion of a stranger (Rebecca), an unseen character (Morris) or by the clipped dialogue which is rackingly stichomythic and in which, as critics have aptly observed, single words such as ‘solicitous’ or ‘clean’ acquire a ‘sinister resonance’ and produce an ‘enigmatic inscrutability’.23 Billington is right when he claims that the major topic of the play is the ‘assault on the pastoral myth’.24 Rebecca self-consciously mentions the Virgilian rural ideal of ‘the harmonious… of the order of things, of the orderly cultivation of things’ (p. 324). Much in this vein, the five-scene structure is an ironical echo of the five-act structure of classical tragedy, the ostensible order and unity of which has become a subject of Crimp’s detached irony as the children’s hand game of rock-paper-scissors determines the succession of the scenes. Crimp makes every scene end with a little parenthetical note which, seen as a whole, produces an ultimately inconclusive sequence of ‘scissors – stone – paper – scissors – stone’.
The children’s game is an acid comment on the power games taking place in Richard and Corinne’s dying marriage, which seems utterly corroded by suspicion and betrayal. It is Corinne who, in a final conversation with Richard, envisions a nightmare future in which she would have to spend the rest of her life ‘simulating love’ (p. 366). The play ends in a Beckettian fashion as a cul-de-sac situation of paralysis:
Kiss me.
The phone continues to ring.
I have kissed you.
Then kiss me again.
Neither moves. The phone continues to ring.
(… stone) (p. 366)
Fewer Emergencies is a trilogy of short plays, which was first performed as a complete trilogy at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 8 September 2005. The structure recalls Crimp’s earlier unpublished Four Attempted Acts. Written as a companion piece to the third part of the trilogy, Fewer Emergencies, Face to the Wall was first co-staged with John Fosse’s nightsongs at the Royal Court in 2002. The British premiere took place after Crimp had written a ‘prequel’ to the two already existing pieces, Whole Blue Sky.25 With this trilogy Crimp continues the minimalist aesthetics of Attempts on Her Life only to exacerbate the process of aesthetic reduction and concentration. The central concern of the play is a formal one: fragments, or rather rudiments of a recognisable plot are entirely channelled into narrative. Crimp ascertains the gender of Speaker 1 in Whole Blue Sky as female, and of Speaker 1 in Face to the Wall as male (in order to make sure they cannot be seen as identical), but narrative context, identity or situation of the nameless speakers in all three short plays remain completely opaque, much enhanced by the carefully and intentionally placed blanks about time and place of the pieces. Crimp, thus, transfers the reception and interpretation of the plays completely into the realm of phenomenological perception and association. Whether we witness ‘a script meeting, a brainstorming session, a rehearsal, or even a performance’, or whether the voices are ‘inside the writer’s own head or those of the actors’ remains open to conjecture.26
In Whole Blue Sky, the absent protagonist within the fictionalisation of the four voices is a woman. She married ‘very young’ (p. 7), presumably too young, and although she loves her husband the marriage seems to be ‘a mistake’ (p. 7). She might leave, but apparently decides to stay, becomes pregnant, yet cannot love the baby, although the baby ‘cements the marriage’ (p. 9) and seems to complete an idyllic family picture that includes the three of them in a fiction of wholeness and clichéd middle-class success of money and property constituting indeed an iconic ‘blue sky’:
Bought him pets, built him snowmen, assembled his jigsaws late at night so that in the morning he’d come down the spiral stairs to find the sky, and I mean the whole blue sky completed, cut the crusts off his sandwiches and taken / the cheese out. (p. 18)
Under the surface of the family pastoral, however, violence is lurking: there’s screaming, violent beating, insults, and the woman’s refusal to sing ‘Mummy and Daddy’s private song’ (p. 20) to the child, Bobby – a last disharmonious note that unmasks the artificial fiction of material comfort established before as a simulacrum of happiness and as an indication of a sham existence.
Violence becomes the central motif of the second short play, Face to the Wall. The narrative by the male Speaker 1 centres on the description of a school massacre. The deflection of action into narrative excellently succeeds in diverting both representation and perception of graphic violence into the realm of the imagination – a strategy that does not make the violence seem any less disturbing but rather creates an atmosphere of spellbinding emotional intensity. Characteristically, the dialogue of the four speakers sets out to run through potential motivations of the killer which is a metadramatic reflex of our own search for meaning in the play, which is, naturally, frustrated: ‘Life’s treating him well’ (p. 28) and there are no clichéd traumata at the basis of the massacre, the killer was neither ‘tortured’ nor ‘abused’ nor ‘fucked up the arse as a child’ (p. 32) – far too easy explanations for Crimp, so it seems. The arbitrary chain of potential motivations brainstormed in the play gets as far as the absurd observation that the postman is sometimes late, which makes the killer angry. Here, the narrative changes its focus and rests on the postman whom his son wakes up in the morning, on which the postman throws ‘hot tea RIGHT IN HIS FACE’ (p. 35) before turning back to the wall. Crimp formally answers the change in narrative focus by an intermedial change of medium as he has the play end on a ‘Twelve-Bar Delivery Blues’ (pp. 34–6). The steady rhythm of the song and the rhyming stanzas produce a disturbing friction with the contents of the song: ‘Hey sonny, / If there’s one thing I’ve learned / It’s don’t rub on butter / When your skin is all burned’ (p. 35).
The third piece of the trilogy, Fewer Emergencies, centres on the child Bobby. The narrative sets off from the observation that there are actually fewer emergencies and that things are in fact improving. But this, it turns out, is only a red herring, a riot starts in the streets and Bobby, who is locked in at home as his parents have gone for a boat ride, is injured by a stray bullet. The play ends on the wounded child painfully crawling up the spiral staircase in order to reach for the key that would open the door, a symbolic action that Crimp again leaves inconclusive:
That’s right, Bobby-boy. Watch the key. Watch the key swinging. (p. 49)
Crimp’s minimalist aesthetics, the nameless speakers, the bare stage, the non-existence of an identifiable setting and time, the stream of images, and the fluidity and ambiguity of the dialogue make Fewer Emergencies look like an abstract, self-reflexive installation which can only suggest a meaning. But then, the self-reflexive structure of the narratives is tied to the icily dry humour of Crimp’s satire evolving a characteristic feeling of angst and imminence that constitutes, as Sierz has argued with reference to Frank Furedi, a critical comment on a ‘culture of fear’ that pervades life in the twenty-first century.27
Crimp’s work oscillates between the extreme of biting social satire and minimalist experiment. Indeed each extreme can never quite do without the other. On the one hand, and, for instance, quite unlike Beckett’s, the minimalism in Crimp, its ambiguities and carefully crafted receptional blanks are always recognisably grounded in contemporary life; on the other hand, the satirical castigation of seemingly deficient moral characteristics of contemporary life always seems self-reflexively broken and far too disjointed to form a reliable moral judgement. The interlacing of the satirical and the self-reflexive, minimalist modes is indicative of Crimp’s phenomenological aesthetics and an accordingly decisive turn of drama towards perception.
Esse est percipi (vel percipere) – to be is to be perceived (or to perceive): this proto-constructivist dictum by George Berkeley may well stand at the beginning of each analysis of Crimp’s work. Thus, even in those plays that seem fairly grounded in reality, the recipient encounters ambiguous, menacing, often opaque and surreal, never conclusive yet always disturbing sceneries, dreamscapes, or frescoes of the skull and, for the most part, achronologically ordered, subjectively experienced slices of life that appear perceived through the reflector instance of human consciousness. The charge of ‘obscurantism’ that critics have occasionally levelled at Crimp ignores the fact that, quite simply, human consciousness does not proceed in an ordered way and that, accordingly, in phenomenological aesthetics normative expectations in traditional stage plays and in teleological and causal developments of their plotlines are insistently contradicted and frustrated.28
As to the critical reception of Crimp’s work, Sierz’s book-length study The Theatre of Martin Crimp must be considered the starting point of every analysis of the plays. Sierz identifies such significant major topics as consumerism, cruel interpersonal relationships, precarious marriages, distorted family structures, victimised children, crisis-laden constructions of the modern subject, prevalent power games, gender issues and, particularly, the male gaze as recurrent topics in Crimp’s work. Important scholarly essays by David Barnett, Clara Escoda Agustí, Heiner Zimmermann and Eckart Voigts-Virchow have related the aesthetics of Crimp’s most experimental work to what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘Postdramatic Theatre’.29 This is as justified as it is problematic. Of course, in plays such as Attempts and Fewer Emergencies post-dramatic elements are manifest: the lack of dramatis personae, the deconstruction of character, the conflagration of discourse that leads nowhere, the often even intermedial switch of genres, the generic inseparability of dialogue and narrative, the disjointed collage of images, the scepticism about meaning and semantics in favour of the self-referential and autopoietic forces of drama and theatre. On the other hand, even though Attempts possesses sections – most notably perhaps the examples of concrete poetry in Scenario 11 or the overkill of simultaneous discourse in various languages in Scenario 16 – which border on what Elfriede Jelinek conceived of as ‘expanses of speech’ (‘Sprachflächen’), by far the largest part of Crimp’s language is the everyday speech of dialogue of ‘real people’ that seems fairly grounded in the tradition of British drama.30
No matter whether one adheres to the term ‘post-dramatic’ or not, Crimp’s plays highlight the performative aspects of both language and identity-construction; in fact, Crimp’s work self-reflexively turns these aspects into major topics. The fluidity and radical openness of Crimp’s phenomenological aesthetics may therefore well be called meta-performative. The way Crimp sees, for instance, the categories of ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ comes closest to the position brought forward by Judith Butler, who argues that gender identity is not based on ontological categories but achieved through institutionalised repetitions of bodily acts.31 The ‘Pornó’ scenario in Attempts and the various deconstructions of the male gaze in Crimp’s work are towering examples of how such institutionalising of gender construction in Crimp (as in Butler) is thwarted and rejected.
As Erika Fischer-Lichte has aptly pointed out, ‘theatre spaces, whether they are permanently installed or merely provisional, are always performative spaces’.32 Again, Crimp’s work appears meta-performative in so far as, for example, the blanks of time and place and the emphasis on rhythm and atmosphere in Crimp’s more experimental pieces reflect on this very performative potential of drama as they open possibilities and avenues for the negotiation of the relationships between text, performance, characters/actors, audience perception and reader response. The open character of these negotiations runs against any sense of continuity or the idea of stable and fixed identities. Even the symbolic qualities of metaphorical reference in the more traditional plays of Crimp’s become deflected into the realm of the allegorical in pieces such as Attempts or Fewer Emergencies. In allegory, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’.33 In Crimp, likewise, ‘materiality, signifier, and signified diverge’.34
The key phenomenon of the construction of all performatives in culture, speech, as well as in Crimp’s work is repetition. As Gilles Deleuze has argued, in a Platonic understanding, repetition rests on consensus.35 As leitmotifs, such ambiguous signifiers as ‘treatment’ and ‘attempts’, to name but two of the most productive, that run through Crimp’s work at least hint at the desire for such consensus. A Nietzschean view of repetition, by contrast, considers the notions of similarity and identity as derivational and conceivable only on the foundation of an all-encompassing difference. Crimp’s work embodies an interlacing of the Platonic and the Nietzschean mode of repetition, with a clear emphasis, however, on difference. In a philosophically still quite harmless way, the protagonist of Crimp’s Play with Repeats has to learn that life is irreversible. In a more complex way, Anne/Anya/Annie/Anny/Annushka in Attempts, to give one final example, constitutes, after all, an empty signifier that impressively stresses what Jacques Derrida called the ‘iterability of the signifier’, stressing that signifiers lack in ultimate authority.36 For Derrida, and for Crimp, the iterability of a sign implies that each sign or each written syntagma could be isolated from the sequence or chain of written speech in which it appears and be ‘grafted’ on to other sequences, other chains.37 No context surrounding a sign could ever capture it completely. It is precisely this radical openness that displaces representation, meaning, and (complete) understanding in Crimp into an ineluctable presence/absence.
It is due to the satirical elements in Crimp that, by definition, must be grounded in real-life contexts that a critical cultural stance does not peter out in mere self-reflexivity. One of the main targets of Crimp’s critical thinking is, in his own words, a ‘Culture of Contentment’.38 The openness of his aesthetics and the perceptual multistability it provokes arouses the activity rather than the contentment of the recipient. A minimum of coherence implies a maximum of associative richness. The chains of association that Crimp’s plays set in motion on the part of the recipient, therefore, possess a decisively ethical potential and appeal. Crimp’s ethics, however, are not the ethics of moral finger-wagging, but the ethics of a brilliantly incoherent art.
Plays One: Dealing with Clair, Play with Repeats, Getting Attention, The Treatment (London: Faber & Faber, 2000).
Plays Two: No One Sees the Video, The Misanthrope, Attempts on Her Life, The Country (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
Fewer Emergencies (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
The City (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).
Barnett, David, ‘When is a Play Not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2008), pp. 14–23.
Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 1–42.
Beckett, Samuel, ‘Three Dialogues’, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writing and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), pp. 138–45.
Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1998).
Butler, Judith, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Performing Feminism, Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), pp. 270–82.
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).
Dennewald, Martine, ‘An den Rändern der Identität: Überindividuelle Figurenkonzeptionen bei Crimp, Kane, Abdoh und Foreman’, Forum Modernes Theater, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2004), pp. 43–71.
Derrida, Jacques, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988), pp. 1–21.
Escoda Agustí, Clara, ‘“head green water to sing”: Minimalism and Indeterminacy in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, in Christoph Henke and Martin Middeke (eds), Drama and/after Postmodernism, Contemporary Drama in English 14 (Trier: WVT, 2007), pp. 149–63.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008).
Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991).
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Mundby (London: Routledge, 2006).
Luckhurst, Mary, ‘Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life’, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2003), pp. 47–60.
Middeke, Martin, ‘Minimal Art: On the Intermedial Aesthetic Context of Samuel Beckett’s Late Theatre and Drama’, Anglia, Vol. 123, No. 3 (2005), pp. 359–80.
Sierz, Aleks, The Theatre of Martin Crimp (London: Methuen Drama, 2006).
—, ‘NTQ Checklist: Martin Crimp’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2006), pp. 352–60.
—, ‘“Form Follows Function”: Meaning and Politics in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies’, Modern Drama, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2007), pp. 375–93.
—, ‘“D’You Really Give My Scribbling That Much Thought?” Narrative Games in the Plays of Martin Crimp’, in Merle Tönnies and Christina Flotmann (eds), Narrative in Drama, Contemporary Drama in English 18 (Trier: WVT, 2011), pp. 257–79.
Voigts-Virchow, Eckart, ‘Postdramatisches Theater: Martin Crimp’, in Merle Tönnies (ed.), Das englische Drama der Gegenwart: Kategorien – Entwicklungen – Modellinterpretationen (Trier: WVT, 2010), pp. 158–71.
Zimmermann, Heiner, ‘Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life: Postdramatic, Postmodern, Satiric?’, in Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (eds), Discontinuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, Contemporary Drama in English 9 (Trier: WVT, 2002), pp. 105–24.
1. Samuel Beckett, ‘Three Dialogues’, p. 139.
2. Aleks Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, pp. 252–6, and Sierz, ‘NTQ Checklist: Martin Crimp’.
3. John O’Mahony, ‘Writers’ Crimp’, Guardian, 20 April 1993, quoted in Sierz, Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 5.
4. Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 3 November 1988; Jim Hiley, Listener, 27 October 1988; Georgina Brown, Independent, 18 October 1988; Theatre Record, Vol. VIII, No. 21 (1988), pp. 1443–5.
5. Sierz, Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 24.
6. Michael Billington, Guardian, 22 April 1993, Theatre Record, Vol. XIII, No. 8 (1993), p. 434.
7. Aleks Sierz, Tribune, 30 April 1993, Theatre Record, Vol. XIII, No. 8 (1993), p. 431.
8. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, p. 6.
9. David Nathan, Jewish Chronicle, 30 April 1993; Neil Smith, What’s On, 24 April 1993; Theatre Record, Vol. XIII, No 8 (1993), pp. 431–4.
10. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action.
11. Quoted in Sierz, Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 45.
12. Michael Billington, Guardian, 15 February 1996, Theatre Record, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1996), p. 205.
13. Crimp quoted in Heiner Zimmermann, ‘Martin Crimp’, p. 108.
14. Sierz, Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 49; Mary Luckhurst, ‘Political Point-Scoring’, p. 49.
15. Shaun Usher, Daily Mail, 14 March 1997, Theatre Record, Vol. XVII, No. 6 (1997), pp. 312–13.
16. Clara Escoda Agustí, ‘“head green water to sing”’, p. 149.
17. Ibid., passim.
18. See Middeke, ‘Minimal Art’.
19. See Sierz, ‘Narrative Games’, and, for the profusion of discourse, Martine Dennewald, ‘An den Rändern der Identität’.
20. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism.
21. See Sierz, Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 56.
22. Ibid, p. 59.
23. Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2000; Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 15 May 2000; Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 10 (2000), pp. 616–17.
24. Michael Billington, Guardian, 17 May 2000, Theatre Record, Vol. XX, No. 10 (2000), p. 618.
25. See Sierz, ‘“Form Follows Function” ’, p. 378.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid, pp. 386–91.
28. Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times, 15 March 1997, Theatre Record, Vol. XVII, No. 6 (1997), p. 313.
29. See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre; Sierz, ‘“Form Follows Function”’; David Barnett, ‘When is a Play Not a Drama?’; Escoda Augustí, ‘“head green water to sing”’; Eckart Voigts-Virchow, ‘Postdramatisches Theater: Martin Crimp’; Zimmermann, ‘Martin Crimp’.
30. See Sierz, ‘“Form Follows Function”’, p. 380.
31. See Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, p. 270, and Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, p. 27.
32. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, p. 107.
33. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 175.
34. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, p. 145.
35. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
36. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’.
37. Ibid., p. 9.
38. Crimp quoted in Sierz, ‘“Form Follows Function”’, p. 386.