Martin Crimp Research Articles

Psychopolitics in Martin Crimp's No One Sees the Video

Byung-Chul Han is a contemporary South Korean-German philosopher known for his work on the intersection of philosophy, culture, and technology. Along with the burnout society, the transparency society, the palliative society, and the infocracy, one of his essential concepts is psychopolitics, which refers to the methods and strategies employed by ruling classes to exert political and economic control over human psychology to better understand individual behaviour within a community. It explores how capitalism, emphasizing personal responsibility and productivity, has led to the internalization of oppressive structures and the erosion of collective resistance. Martin Crimp's theatre is at the confluence of late twentieth-century capitalism and early twenty-first-century neoliberalism. In No One Sees the Video, one of the most distinguished plays ever written in the post-wall period on late capitalism, Martin Crimp portrays a world in decay under the control of psycho-power, as Byung-Chul Han pinpoints. He carefully shows the impact of consumerism addiction on individuals imposed by capitalism, highlighting the role of the human psyche. The purpose of this study is to investigate Martin Crimp's portrayal of psychopolitics in No One Sees the Video.

The Inoperative Community in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre

Abstract The literary genre of drama and its performative realisation in the theatre are based on dialogue and interaction. In this, drama and theatre have always had a close affinity to the structures of society in general and community in particular. I shall argue in the following that Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles (2017), Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground (2023), and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People (2022) can be considered as deconstructions of a traditional understanding of community. I shall argue that the designs of community that emanate from these plays conceptually highlight an alternative model of community, which – following the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben – I shall call an “inoperative” (Nancy) or “coming” community (Agamben). The inoperative nature of these communities, which the three plays not only reflect upon but also constitute by themselves, is marked by a shift to singularity, by an openness to the Other, by fluid dramatic/theatrical/linguistic structures that challenge traditional normative and exclusionary practices and borders. The deconstructive aesthetics at work in all three plays reveals an inoperative community which denotes a potentiality that is always on the horizon, but never fully actualised. All three plays become epitomes for defining the ethical as well as the aesthetic programme of much British theatre in the twenty-first century: they question (and reject) traditional concepts of community that are based on unity or identity, while they also criticise overreaching, neoliberal individualism and the decline of communal interactions.

Postdramatic Tendencies in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies

Martin Crimp has been one of the most prominent playwrights on the British stage since his first appearance. Although his oeuvre consists of absurdist and postdramatic plays, he translated classic texts such as Cyrano De Bergerac, Rhinoceros, The Seagull and The Misanthrope. Fewer Emergencies is a short play that forms part of Crimp's triptych, which also includes Whole Blue Sky and Face to the Wall. In Fewer Emergencies, Crimp creates a theatrical atmosphere that deconstructs the tenets of conventional dramatic theatre. In the playlet the characterisation is reminiscent of his earlier thought-provoking Attempts on Her Life, which had no obvious character attributions. In Fewer Emergencies he makes a similar kind of characterisation. He simply numbers the characters 1, 2, 3. In this way, Crimp creates an inspiring theatrical space. The aim of this study is to uncover the postdramatic theatricality of Crimp's Fewer Emergencies.

Bilinmeyen Karakterler ve Yitik Bütünlük: Martin Crimp’ın Whole Blue Sky Oyunundaki Postdramatic Yansımalar

This study aims to reveal the postdramatic theatricalities in Martin Crimp's Whole Blue Sky (2005). Martin Crimp has been one of the most prolific, controversial and satirical playwrights since his plays were first staged in British theatres in the late 1980s. While his early plays evoke the absurdist tradition, his later plays emphasize innovative theatrical elements labelled in-yer-face, postdramatic and New Writing. Considering Crimp's wideranging body of work, his distinctive theatrical style is clearly recognizable. Although postdramatic theater is usually associated with theater movements that emerged after the 1990s, it dates back to the theater of Bertold Brecht. For this reason, postdramatic debates are briefly discussed in the Introduction. Whole Blue Sky (2005), which is the field of application of this study, is a short play in the collection of Fewer Emergencies (2005) and Face to the Wall (2005). Moreover, the text in question is completely anonymous and consists of three characters numbered 1, 2 and 3. It is known that character 1 is the only female character in the text. In addition, it is seen that the plot and other traditional principles of theatre evaporate in the play. This study presents an evaluation of Crimp's Whole Blue Sky (2005) in terms of postdramatic theatrical features.

Staging Absence: Postdramatic Aesthetics in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997/2007) & Rabie Mroué and Linah Saneh’s 33 Rpm and Few Seconds (2013)

Staging Absence: Postdramatic Aesthetics in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997/2007) & Rabie Mroué and Linah Saneh’s 33 Rpm and Few Seconds (2013)

Kentli Tüketim Toplumu Eleştirisi Olarak Martin Crimp Tiyatrosu

Martin Crimp criticises the urban culture based on pleasure and temptation in real-life contexts. Crimp depicts moral ambiguity and corruption faced by society and individuals in dealing with the problems caused by the free-market economy and globalisation in a background of an urban consumer society. Martin Crimp criticises contemporary urban life, in which consumerism has become a way of life, in the context of the social and individual degeneration, decay, uncertainty, violence and insecurity he witnesses. In his plays, Crimp delineates the issues of loss of tradition and value, social collapse, loneliness, and self-repetitive life in a bleak reality with a desire for an alternative life. In this context, to frame the theoretical structure of this study, the British society and theatre, starting with The Margaret Thatcher era into the first decade of the 2000s, will be analysed in terms of economic, political, and cultural changes that affect and transform society and the individuals as reflected in the plays. This study will discuss Martin Crimp’s stage plays titled Dealing with Clair (1988), The Treatment (1993), and The City (2008) within a social, cultural, political, and economic context.

Harold Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborations

Harold Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborations

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

INTERTEKSTUALNO ČITANjE DRAME „ŽUDNjA“ SARE KEJN

According to Aleks Sierz (2001: 118), Sarah Kane’s Crave needs four different reading strat- egies to fully uncover its meanings. This paper takes one of those strategies – an intertextual reading – to examine the play’s echoes of R. W. Fassbinder, Martin Crimp, and T. S. Eliot. Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life, and Eliot’s poem The Waste Land enable Sarah Kane to combine materials – forms, sources, messages, sounds, dialogues and solos – into a complex dramatic structure that unsettles the plot-and-character conventions of realism. De-individualized characters, marked only by the letters A, B, C, and M, reveal the presence of Pre-Paradise Sorry Now and Attempts on Her Life – they allow Kane to use fragmentary lines of action to explore how power is organized and shared within a social group. The analysis shows that Eliot’s narrative poem The Waste Land is the principal influence that ‘guides Crave in both form and content’ (Saunders 2002: 102). In addition to the wasteland motif, Kane employs Eliot’s rhapsodic impulse to combine disparate patches of text and dramatic, epic and lyrical elements into a never-ending flow of voices.

Examining Martin Crimp’s Political Aesthetic inThe CountryandThe City

This article compares Martin Crimp’s portrayal of the artist in The Country (2000) and The City (2008) to contextualize his oeuvre within late capitalism, suggesting that Crimp moves from a predominantly social critique of art as a transmitter of ruling-class ideology to a more nuanced exploration of the challenge of producing art that is not governed by dehumanizing laws of exchange. In The Country, Crimp uses pastoral imagery and the characterization of Corinne, the romantic protagonist, to espouse a social critique of art by showing how it has propped up a fundamentally conservative set of ideals and thus has preserved the status quo. The City, on the other hand, takes up an artistic critique of capitalism through metatheatre to reveal the ways in which human creativity and freedom are restrained by the logic of the market. By considering the role of the artist in these two plays, I argue that Crimp’s political aesthetic seeks to disrupt the exchange value of art and foreground the human impulse toward creativity.

CULTURAL MATERIALIST READING OF DEALING WITH CLAIR

Throughout history, an authority with certain rules has governed all societies, and each authority has had different impacts on society. Since theatre is a reflection of society and culture, it carries the traces of the development and changes of political and ideological concepts over time. With the emergence of playwrights such as Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and Martin Crimp in the British political theatre after 1970, a new era has begun in British theatre. The purpose of this article is to explore the interconnection between the political and social changes of the period through the lens of Martin Crimp’s play Dealing with Clair (1988). Moreover, in the light of cultural materialist critics (e.g. Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, and Raymond Williams), it will put forth Crimp’s perspective against power ideologies in the late twentieth century.

Dit hjem er et minefelt!

Taking the vocabulary of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a methodological point of departure, Mads Thygesen writes about political satire in Advice to Iraqi Women (2003) by Martin Crimp.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Martin Crimp’s Piece “Advice to Iraqi Women”

Language is a vehicle for social values and ideologies that a man intends or attempts to express. Dramatic texts are one of the discursive practices that embody values and ideologies. What is expressed in dramatic text is deliberate because it is meant to affect other’s values, trends and ideologies in one way or another. Such ideologies and values are not explicit. To bring them out requires putting language under scrutiny to unveil what is implied. The present study attempts to analyze a dramatic script entitled Advice to Iraqi Women by the British playwright Martin Crimp in an attempt to unveil the intended political ideologies underlying the text. The title reflects a political aspect embedded in the word “Iraqi” that brings to the mind the war broken out there at that time. Notwithstanding that the script is written in such an unusual manner that appears to the reader or the spectator to be domestic, familiar and free from any political indications. The model adopted in the analysis of Crimp’s theatrical piece is that of van Dijk’s macro and microstructure analysis within critical discourse analysis. Results have manifested the political ideologies that the writer intends to convey. He attempted to bridge a gap and render the English society to be associated emotionally with the repercussions of the remote war by amalgamating what is familiar with what is unfamiliar.

In Conversation on the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Sarah Frankcom worked at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester between 2000 and 2019, and was the venue’s first sole Artistic Director from 2014. In this interview conducted in summer 2019, she discusses her time at the theatre and what she has learned from leading a major cultural organization and working with it. She reflects on a number of her own productions at this institution, including Hamlet, The Skriker, Our Town, and Death of a Salesman, and discusses the way the theatre world has changed since the beginning of her career as she looks forward to being the director of LAMDA. Rachel Clements lectures on theatre at the University of Manchester. She has published on playwrights Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, among others, and has edited Methuen student editions of Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange. She is Book Reviews editor of NTQ.

Gertrude Stein Oyunlarında Karşı-Anlatı Stratejileri

When theatre in general is taken into consideration, two pioneers particularly stand out in the Historical Avant-Garde period and they can be seen as intellectual ancestors of the 1970s: Antonin Artaud from Continental Europe who objected to the “rational word” logos and therefore to the text; and Gertrude Stein from the American continent who tried to reject logos which fastened to Western theatre with a tight belt without negating text, while writing her first play What Happened. In experimental theatre attempts of the 1970s, the text was not totally rejected: in the experimental theatre from Robert Wilson to Richard Foreman or in the new-textuality from Sarah Kane to Martin Crimp, the density of the word and writing was altered; thus, a hybridization that exceeded both the theatre and performance classic definitions was revealed. The aim of this article is to exemplify the anti-narrative strategies of Gertrude Stein’s plays, in which she tried to remove the “sequence-of-events” of the absolute condition of the conventional narrative definition instead of negating text.

The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

AbstractBased on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

Deconstructing Character and Identity In Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life

Deconstructing Character and Identity In Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life

Cruelty, tenderness and anger: Ensuring the Women of Trachis speak to our times

At a time when the vocality of women’s anger seems particularly pertinent, this article examines two contemporary adaptations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, both of which draw our attention to the abused and traditionally mute character of Iole. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1999 radio adaptation, Dianeira, illustrates dramatically the perils of keeping Iole silent, whilst Martin Crimp’s 2004 stage adaptation, Cruel and Tender, imagines the result of giving her a voice. This article considers how both plays resonate with the gendered and international conflicts of the contemporary world.

Masters (and Mistresses) of Menace

AbstractIn Harold Pinter’s last completed project before his death, a screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s playSleuth(1970), a large publicity poster dominates the study of crime novelist Andrew Wyke, describing him as ‘the master of menace.’ This is also a self-referential joke directed at Pinter’s association with ‘comedies of menace,’ such asA Slight Ache(1957) andThe Birthday Party(1958), that succeeded in creating feelings of unease and discomfort in ways that had not been seen in the theatre before.As a repertory actor before he became a dramatist, Pinter was likely to have encountered the fears and insecurities that theatre can create, and these perhaps return in the sinister environments that we find in his early plays. In turn, the queasiness and growing unease we encounter in Pinter’s drama has been appropriated by other ‘childe Harolds’ including Philip Ridley, Anthony Neilson, Martin Crimp, and Jez Butterworth, whose work follows variations of the Pinteresque. This article looks at some of the ways these dramatists have developed on from Pinter’s template of creating a sense of unease, yet at the same time these dramatists show an awareness of how the nature of fear has radically altered since the turn of the millennium. Signs of this change can also be found in Pinter’s work from the 1980 s: whereas previously fear had been vague in its aetiology, now it came out of the shadows to be named: Pinter’s ‘comedies of menace’ gave way to plays about torture by repressive political regimes inParty Time(1991) and memories of the Holocaust inAshes to Ashes(1997).Since then the depiction of states of fear have forked off on two separate paths: latter day ‘childe Harolds’ such as Philip Ridley continue to promote what he has called ‘theatre as a ghost train,’ a place of disorientation designed to induce fear for its own sake, while a larger contingent that include Simon Stephens, Duncan Macmillan, Mike Bartlett, Martin Crimp, and Mark Ravenhill also make fears manifest: these include terrorism and the ensuing War on Terror, the Anthropocene and climate change and the precarity and repression of neo-liberal economies and the alienation of self-hood through technology.