Martin Crimp Research Articles

Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 by Eleftheria Ioannidou

Reviewed by: Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 by Eleftheria Ioannidou Margherita Laera Eleftheria Ioannidou. Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005. Classical Presences Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. xii + 240 pp. Cloth, $95. Eleftheria Ioannidou's first monograph is a welcome addition to classical reception studies from a scholar equally embedded in the disciplines of classics and theatre and performance studies, whose level of expertise and fluency in both academic fields and several European languages is remarkable. The volume examines the relationship between the notion of tragedy and postmodern theory and aesthetics through an analysis of a series of plays which rewrite ancient dramatic material. In the past few decades, the debate about contemporary theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy in western drama has been dominated by classical scholars based at, or associated with, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) research centre at the University of Oxford, founded by Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin in 1996; Ioannidou is currently an Early-Career Associate member, despite being based in the Netherlands as a Lecturer in Theatre. Publications from the international pool of eminent, mid- and early-career APGRD scholars have flooded the market since the year 2000, notably with volumes such as Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley's edited collection Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (2004). The present study emerged as a doctoral thesis supervised at Oxford by the now Director of APGRD, Fiona Macintosh, and operates within the same territory of Dionysus Since 69; it dissects western playwrights' re-imaginings of Athenian tragedy from the 1970s to the early years of the 21st century, but Ioannidou's point of departure is narrower in focus. In line with her colleagues at APGRD, however, she privileges textual analysis over a theorization of performance, despite the word "performance" being in the title of the research centre. Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames takes its cue from Terry Eagleton's position, articulated in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), that postmodernism and its inherent conservatism is incompatible with tragedy as a genre, aesthetic category and structure of feeling because "if human beings are fragments, they are not even coherent enough to be the bearers of tragic meaning" (Eagleton quoted in Ioannidou, 2). Relying on and extending Raymond Williams' historical materialism in Modern Tragedy (1966), Ioannidou's project is therefore to show how tragedy is "not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences, conventions and institutions" (Williams quoted in Ioannidou, 25) [End Page 373] that can be adapted to suit different historical periods and literary movements, including postmodernism. The overarching argument proposed by Ioannidou is that the prevalent postmodern gesture is to "undo" Greek texts in order to question the "system of exclusions or oppression that have been inscribed in them within a long history of reception" (4). She continues: "Greek tragedy itself is subjected to critique both as a category used to legitimize acts of retribution as well as a dramatic form that epitomizes the historical paradigm of the Western world, not least in its failings and discontents" (4). After a discussion of the modern critical debate on tragedy—from Nietzsche to Steiner, Brecht, Benjamin, Williams, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Eagleton, Maffessoli—Ioannidou proceeds to examine three plays that "propose a new ethics of appropriation of the canon" and "introduce a politics of viewing that transposes the ethical question into the process of reception" (71); namely Steven Berkoff's Greek (1994), Hélène Cixous's La ville parjure (1994) and Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender (2004). According to Ioannidou, these plays "break with tragedy as a category that reaffirms aesthetic hierarchies and cultural hegemonies and invite audiences to reflect on the ways in which suffering is mediated, contained, and evaluated" (71). Ioannidou then turns to investigate how postmodern tragedies engage with metatheatre, with reference to Pavlos Matesis' Roar (1998), Andreas Staïkos' Clytemnestra? (1975), Brian Friel's Living Quarters: After Hippolytus (1977), Athol Fugard's The Island (1973), and Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Medea (1977). Here, Ioannidou contends that rewritings by Matesis...

Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis

This book analyses twenty-first-century plays by nine influential British writers – Caryl Churchill, Mike Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, debbie tucker green, and Lucy Prebble – in the context of contemporary social crises, particularly economic crises – and finds reasons to be hopeful.

George Benjamin: Lessons in Love and Violence, reviewed by Axel Englund

Lessons in Love and Violence Royal Opera House at Covent Garden Composer: George Benjamin Libretto: Martin Crimp World premiere: May 10, 2018 Production direction: Katie Mitchell Musical director/conductor: George Benjamin King: Stéphane Degout Gaveston/Stranger: Gyula Orendt Isabel: Barbara Hannigan Mortimer: Peter Hoare Boy, later Young King: Samuel Boden Girl: Ocean Barrington-Cook Witness 1/Singer 1/Woman 1: Jennifer France Witness 2/Singer 2/Woman 2: Krisztina Szabó Witness 3/Madman: Andri Björn Róbertsson “Let us spend money on poetry and music,” announces the King from the stage of the Royal Opera House, which incidentally boasts an annual expenditure of about £130M, “or would you rather we preferred for our entertainment human blood and the machinery of killing?”1 The juxtaposition of real violence—whether it is immediate aggression or wrapped in political decisions—and its theatrical representation runs through every scene of Lessons in Love and Violence, the new opera by composer George Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp, which premiered at Covent Garden on May 10, 2018 in a production directed by Katie Mitchell. Despite its title, the second full-scale opera by this creative team is hardly didactic in its ambitions.2 Instead, the scintillating shades of Benjamin’s orchestra—expanded at significant moments by the uncustomary colors of cimbalom and tombak, a drum with its roots in ancient Persia—turn in a slow-motion dance with Crimp’s evocative text, in which every line seems haunted by all others through allusion, permutation, and inversion.

Towards a Narrative Aesthetic?

This article investigates the decrease of typographically identifiable stage directions in British drama since the 1990s. Taking the ongoing scholarly debate about the theatrical or literary status of stage directions as its point of departure, it explores and compares the shift from acting to storytelling that characterizes Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997), Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water) (2006) and Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007). All three plays juxtapose mimetic minimalism with diegetic density. Their postdramatic ways of writing character cast actors as storytellers and point towards a narrative aesthetic. As well as the distinction between primary and secondary text, the plays also undermine dramatic conventions concerning plot in different ways that contribute to their postdramatic ›openness‹ and their deliberate appeal to creative intervention when reading or staging them.

Reception

With Killing Hercules, Richard Rowland has produced a wide-ranging trans-historical discussion of re-workings of the relationship between the mythical Hercules and Deinaira, from Sophocles’ fifth-century bceTrachiniae to Martin Crimp's 2004 play, Cruel and Tender, and a 2014 staging of Handel's operatic Hercules. Impressive for the breath-taking variety of receptions of the story of Deianira's killing of her husband, the volume devotes as much attention to medieval, post-Reformation, and eighteenth-century versions as to ancient texts (including, as well as Sophoclean tragedy, receptions in Latin – for example, the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus and Ovid's Heroides – which lie behind many post-classical re-workings of the story) and contemporary retellings; the study touches on several Italian, French, and German versions as well as those in English. As a scholar who has direct experience of theatre practice, Rowland draws on his involvement in staged versions of both Trachiniae (his own verse translation, which he includes as an appendix) and Cruel and Tender in order to provide fresh insights on both of these texts. The resulting volume, which illustrates the complex and varied reflections on masculinity and sexual identity prompted by the characters of Hercules and Deianira, has at its heart questions relating to the gendered role of violence in retellings of the myth both on a domestic level and in relation to international politics. Hercules has been seen as everything from the epitome of masculine virtue and heroic self-sacrifice to abuser and serial adulterer, ‘sexual deviant and disastrous husband’ (115); in her turn, Deianira – in some versions denied a voice altogether – has been variously portrayed as duplicitous or insane, or as a victim whose killing of her abuser is deserving of sympathy. The chapter on the Middle Ages illustrates well the re-appropriation of the story to serve a range of political, religious, and social agendas – from condemnation of Hercules’ lack of self-control by Augustine to valorization of his sexual violence, as well as the misogynist and misogamist interpretations of Deianira which were marshalled in service of debates on the role of marriage. Elsewhere, Rowland shows how the tale could be used simultaneously on both sides of a single political conflict – during the Civil War period, both regicides and royalists used lines from Seneca's Hercules Furens to insist on the rectitude of their respective stances (153–4). Even those already familiar with the reception of the figure of Hercules will find something new in this rich exploration of the pliability of one mythical story.

Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini

Reviewed by: Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini Amanda Dawson Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage. By Sara Soncini. University of Exeter Press, 2015. Cloth $100.00, Paper $35.00. xvii + 295 pages. Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015) by Sara Soncini is a monograph that considers how contemporary wars are presented on the British stage. This book investigates plays, playwrights, productions, and the strategies they deploy in responding to contemporary wars and issues of representation through storytelling and performance. The book posits a correlation between real-world conflict and how it is represented on stage, assessing the impact of theatre as a tool for understanding war and violence. Through a close reading of over twenty-five plays, Forms of Conflict investigates the cultural and political relevance of these plays. Moreover, the author seeks to answer questions of how theatre provides new ways of interpreting war in a world "enmeshed in permanent war" (xiii), and how new wars influence new forms of dramatic storytelling. Forms of Conflict makes a compelling argument that, just as the landscape of war is ever changing, so is the landscape of new war plays (post-9/11 conflicts). This in-depth look at new wars on the British stage is a welcome addition to scholarship on representations of war. Soncini looks at plays that highlight new techniques and insights on contemporary warfare and global representation. These scripts were written by British and British-based writers, and even a few non-British playwrights whose work premiered in the UK, including Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, and David Hare, among others. Some of the plays are well known while others remain unpublished. Soncini also attended productions, when possible, at [End Page 167] major theatres, as well as at smaller theatre companies. While the texts are Soncini's primary materials, she felt "more comfortable" discussing plays she saw in person or on video (xv). The monograph is divided into five chapters. In chapter 1, "Introduction: Mapping the Terrain," Soncini presents her argument about "new wars" in opposition to "old wars" (xiii). Old wars might simply be described as what is typically thought of as wars in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. "Old wars," Soncini writes, are in the "Clausewitzean modes of conflict," referencing Carl von Clausewitz and his foundational theories about war, published in On War in 1832 (xiii). New wars, on the other hand, are looser in definition, perhaps explained best as forms of organized violence, which is meant to include mass acts of violence and terrorism, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001. The plays investigated here were written and performed close to or after 9/11. Chapter 2, titled "This is Not a War," "sets out to fathom the reverberations of the increasingly virtual nature of contemporary wars on the visual and verbal textures of their dramatic reconfigurations" (19). In many of the plays discussed in this chapter, the visual, visceral imagery of war is absent, unlike in film as Soncini notes, where the violence of war is almost always present. This absence of war is not unusual in war plays at large, but is arguably more prevalent in contemporary war plays. For example, Soncini describes the 1997 production of Caryl Churchill's This is a Chair at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which began with a proj ection of a text reading "'The War in Bosnia,'" while the action on stage was of a man holding flowers as he waits for his date. This highlights Soncini's argument for how the fighting and violence of war serves as the backdrop or even the topic of the play, yet is not fully present. Soncini shifts her focus to documentary theatre in chapters 3 and 4 by engaging with playwright David Hare, a major figure in war-based theatre. Hare's 2002 article in the Guardian, "Why Fabulate?," provides the title for Soncini's third chapter, in which Hare questions whether fiction is the appropriate form for examining war. The chapter discusses documentary theatre and its reflections of reality by highlighting tribunal plays, which utilize official transcripts, such as...

Attempts on (writing) her life: ethics and ontology in pro-feminist playwriting.

Does a feminist dramaturgy exist for male playwrights? The post-1990s work of British playwrights Simon Stephens, Tim Crouch and Martin Crimp variously enact an attrition between female protagonists and male writers. Appraising these "attempts on (writing) her life" requires a feminist criticality that can incorporate the unique, intersubjective relation of playwright and character. What is the gendered relationship of these actors? In the manner of Performance/Philosophy, this essay finds that Levinasian fecundity answers this call – finding a crucial space for continental philosophy in the pro-feminist movement. Drawing on the philosophical significance of “objectification”, this essay argues that ethical portrayals of gender - in Peggy Phelan’s notion of the ‘representational economy’ - bestow a responsibility upon male playwrights to explore the potential to contribute to feminist critical writing. Whether this is a matter of ontology – and the essentialism of sexual difference that accompanies such a position – is weighed against the ethics of men-writing-women.

The Uncomely Comedy: Celebrating the Divided Subject in Contemporary British Drama

Dans le théâtre britannique traditionnel, la comédie, qu’elle se donne comme comédie de mœurs ou plus tard comme pièce « bien faite », se caractérise par son aspect divertissant allié à une légèreté de ton. Péripéties et rires francs se succèdent pour culminer en un dénouement heureux et festif (bien souvent un mariage). Mais la Seconde Guerre mondiale a constitué un tournant décisif pour le genre comique, confrontant les dramaturges à un questionnement éthique autour de la possibilité même de rire dans ces nouvelles conditions. La comédie n’est pas sortie indemne de l’épisode de l’Holocauste, comme le révèlent les mises en scène de fêtes, devenues de pâles reflets spectraux voire lugubres de cette légèreté qui caractérisait jadis le genre. Les rassemblements festifs, désormais mornes voire inquiétants, n’ont plus vocation à célébrer le dénouement heureux de la pièce ni à faire valoir un quelconque retour à l’équilibre. En nous intéressant à un corpus de pièces contemporaines britanniques mettant en scène des fêtes de Noël ( Absurd Person Singular d’Alan Ayckbourn, Harry’s Christmas de Steven Berkoff et In the Republic of Happiness de Martin Crimp), nous analyserons le statut du comique dans ces festivités bien particulières où l’épuisement et la destruction ne sont jamais loin, où l’excès vient paradoxalement célébrer le rien. Nous nous attacherons à montrer que ces fêtes ( part-ies ) paradoxales s’efforcent de faire advenir sur scène un nouveau sujet contemporain, essentiellement divisé. L’exaltation et la célébration de cette division contribuent dès lors à un renouvellement de la forme dramatique et engendrent un nouveau type de comédies.

Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre by Mary Mazzilli

Reviewed by: Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre by Mary Mazzilli Tarryn Li-Min Chun Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre. By Mary Mazzilli. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015. Ebook, $72.99; cloth, $104.00. Since Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, his work has drawn a steady stream of attention from scholars of Chinese literature, culture, and theatre. Much of this scholarship has grappled with the same questions that caused controversy when Gao was awarded the Nobel: should he be considered a Chinese writer, when he has French citizenship and the government of the People’s Republic of China refuses to acknowledge him as such? Alternatively, can we brand him a writer of Chinese literature, even though he now also writes in French? Or are terms such as “transcultural” and “transnational” better descriptors despite the difficulty of precisely defining them? In Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre, Mary Mazzilli begins with a critique of the prevailing obsession with China in scholarship on Gao’s dramatic oeuvre and proposes instead a move away from issues of identity and the East-West binary. Her study builds on other work in this vein—such as that of Sy Ren Quah (2004), Claire Conceison (2009), and Todd Coulter (2014)—but offers a new intervention by decoupling plays written while Gao was still in China from those composed after the author’s self-imposed exile to France in 1987. Focusing on the latter group of “post-exile” plays enables Mazzilli to reposition Gao in relation to more global trends in theatre, namely the postdramatic turn of the late twentieth century. The goals of the monograph are twofold: first, to demonstrate the connections between Gao’s dramatic work and that of other contemporary European playwrights, and second, to show how this reconsideration of Gao reshapes our broader understanding of transnationalism and of postdramatic theatre. [End Page 239] Mazzilli offers a new critical term—“postdramatic transnationalism”—that brings the work of German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann to bear on concepts of the transnational. She aligns the dramatic with earlier, binary models of transnationalism—“home country vs. destination country”—and the postdramatic with a more recent, fluid, and multivalent transnationalism that has “embraced its own hybridity” (p. 7). In Gao Xingjian’s post-exile work for the theatre, she contends, we see a form of contemporary transnationalism that transcends ideology and is akin to postdramatic theatre in its rejection of prescriptive (often nation-based) cultural and aesthetic norms. To borrow Gao’s own words, it is “withoutisms” (meiyou zhuyi). The book’s two lines of argument unfold in tandem over the course of its six body chapters, all of which are anchored by close readings of Gao’s post-exile plays. Chapter 1 begins with a thorough discussion of postdramatic theatre, with reference to Elinor Fuch’s The Death of Character (1996), Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006), and the work of Austrian playwrights Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek. In this chapter, Mazzilli argues that The Other Shore (Bi’an, 1986), written shortly before Gao left China, begins for the playwright a process of “breaking further away from the dramatic and exploring the possibilities of the theatrical” (p. 46)—in other words, a move away from realism, dialogue and linear dramatic action, and a closed “fictive cosmos,” and toward the use of dream images, monologue and narrative, physicality and musicality, and self-referentiality. Subsequent chapters follow this process of exploration chronologically and delve further into the use of postdramatic techniques in Gao’s later work. Chapters 2 and 3 take a comparative approach, demonstrating that Gao shares certain stylistic and thematic concerns with other contemporary postdramatic playwrights. In chapter 2, for example, Mazzilli reads Gao’s Between Life and Death (Shengsijie or Au bord de la vie, 1991) alongside British playwright Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life—Seventeen Scenarios for Theatre (1997). With reference to some of Lehmann’s key terms, she argues that both plays use “post-epic narration” to string together sequences of otherwise unconnected theatrical moments and that both create a “theatre of spectatorship” by self-consciously...

The Complex Nature of Power and Language: Verbal Strategies in Martin Crimp’s The City

The purpose of the paper is to examine the dynamic relationships between language and power in The City (2008), which was written by the groundbreaking playwright Martin Crimp. In a systematic and intentional way, Crimp’s language resists the established conventional standards and challenges any typical expectations for dramatic discourse. Crimp deconstructs language and dismantles its authorial guidance. He employs stimulating and inventive dialogues through word games and language strategies and devices such as repetitions, interruptions, silences and pauses, denial, concealment, other enhancement, negation, formulation, topic-shift and turn-taking. Crimp exploits language through effective and energetic rhythm, structure and form in order to depict the ethical disasters of the contemporary world. The playwright breaks the traditional dramatic form, replacing it with his unique device where the language does not communicate meaning but acts as a means of articulating power through verbal strategies.

Introduction: Attempts on His Life – Martin Crimp – playwright, translator, translated: Martin Crimp in conversation

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UCL Guest session: Attempts on His Life – Martin Crimp – playwright, translator, translated

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Martin Crimp’s pulverized cities: Dislocation, places and theatre spaces

Abstract This article considers how Martin Crimp’s plays imagine and create space starting with his cities, and moving into his houses, as they appear in his playtexts and in production. Considering both original plays such as Attempts on Her Life (1997), The City (2008), Fewer Emergencies (2002/2005) and In the Republic of Happiness (2012) and his contemporary adaptation Cruel and Tender (2004) (after Sophocles’ Trachiniae), the article traces Crimp’s translations, transpositions, allusions and dislocations of space and particularly the circulation of the image of a city under siege. Reading these pulverized cities in tandem with some of the ideas about the ‘inferno’ from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities ([1972/1974] 1997), the article suggests that the creation of contested imaginary space opens up questions and possibilities for audiences of his plays.

The space and culture of translation: Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth by Martin Crimp and Katie Mitchell

Abstract This article focuses on Martin Crimp’s collaborations with Katie Mitchell in the context of productions of plays that involve a process of translation and whose source language is German. Specifically, the article concentrates on the productions of Pains of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner at the National Theatre in 2009 and of The Jewish Wife by Bertolt Brecht at the Young Vic in 2007. The article offers a distinction when it comes to the terms adaptation, translation and version, before arguing that even in cases where Crimp has not produced a translation as such, but, rather, a version – as in the examples of these two texts – there is a substantial amount of translation involved. This translation is spatial, cultural, corporeal and indeed verbal, rendering the source text into a product that is responsive to a contemporary audience. Beginning with a consideration of The Jewish Wife, the article then goes on to examine in detail the methods through which Crimp and Mitchell delivered a modern staging of Pains of Youth that was entirely attuned to its modern-day context while remaining sensitive to its original cultural environment.

Adapting Greek tragedy during the War on Terror: Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender

Abstract When contemporary playwrights adapt ancient tragedy they often distance themselves from their source, claiming that their adaptations are stand-alone plays that do not evince a complex relationship with the classical material. Martin Crimp differs remarkably from this, and is on record stating that Cruel and Tender, his adaptation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, not only recalls the original’s structure, but also engages with its metrical patterns. In this article I build upon Crimp’s invitation to consider the two plays in dialogue by exploring Crimp’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Herakles figure, and the representation of this character in Luc Bondy’s 2004 production of the play. I argue that Crimp’s adaptation sheds light upon the performance dynamics of Sophocles’ lyrics and can help clarify debates over the text. In addition, I posit that Cruel and Tender can contribute to scholarship on the connection between combat trauma and Greek tragedy. By examining two of the ways that analysing Cruel and Tender can transform our understanding of Trachiniae, I demonstrate how practitioner readings of the classics can provide insight into debates over dramaturgical uncertainties in ancient tragedy, and the means through which these can be clarified in performance.

The sweetheart factor: Tracing translation in Martin Crimp’s writing for theatre

Abstract Martin Crimp’s activity as a playwright includes the translation and adaptation of the theatrical works of other writers. This article considers how Crimp’s theoretical and practical engagement with translation is manifested in his writing for the stage. Crimp’s voice on and in translation is analysed: first, from the perspective of translation theory, in particular as it relates to Crimp’s discussions on translation and adaptation; and second, in a study of Crimp’s use of the word ‘sweetheart’ in his various writings, including his translations and adaptations of works by other playwrights. I conclude that Crimp’s authorial presence exists throughout his work, whether self-authored, translated or adapted, while simultaneously operating to recognize the plurality of voices within a translated text.

Martin Crimp’s translations of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love and The False Servant: Capturing the essence of marivaudage in English

Abstract This article examines how Martin Crimp manages to capture Marivaux’s art of dialogue in his translations into English of La Fausse Suivante and Le Triomphe de l’amour. It is focused on the function of repetition, identified as a central device in the construction of the Marivaudian dialogue and its handling by Crimp in English. In maintaining a dense network of repetitions, Crimp attempts to recreate the rhythm and tempo characteristic of marivaudage, while reinforcing the dramatic impact of the dialogue. He also aims to make the often opaque meaning of the original more directly accessible, partly by resorting to a more concrete and factual vocabulary, partly by disentangling the syntactic complexities characteristic of Marivaux’s style. Reading Crimp’s translations, one may even feel that the basic mechanisms at work in marivaudage become more easily identifiable.

Capturing Crimp’s soundscape

Abstract In this age of post-dramaticity that does away with such definitional concepts as conflict or fiction on a mimetic stage, Martin Crimp relocates ‘drama’ (action, conflict) within language itself. The translator’s challenge consists in fleshing out the materiality of sound and in capturing the dramaticity of the form as it is reinvented in musicality and in the underground activity of an often gendered lexis. Lacan’s concept of ‘moterialism’ as well as Roland Barthes’s ‘signifiance’ of language will be helpful concepts both for a theoretical investigation and for addressing the practical translation challenges. French director Marc Paquien’s metaphorical use of Chaillot’s monumental staircase and Hubert Colas’s expressionistic white balloons in their productions of Fewer Emergencies will help us visualize what is at stake in Crimp’s language and confirm the impression of contained semantic plenitude I could sense and analyse both as Crimp’s translator and as an academic.

Literary criticism, theatre theory and the director’s task: Katie Mitchell’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull

This article looks at how Chekhov’s play The Seagull thematises the challenges of translating and directing theatre texts, focusing specifically on Katie Mitchell’s 2006 production of Martin Crimp’s version of the play. It suggests that literary criticism remains an important tool for theorising theatre texts and performance. By focusing on the frictions between analysis of the text as language and approaches that equally emphasise the visual, the embodied and the performative, we can develop interesting theoretical perspectives on the relationship between words as material to be read, and the broader functions of the words of theatre texts in performance. In this case in particular, the article works through some of the challenges and choices a director like Katie Mitchell faces when converting a passion for literature, via a play that reflects theoretically on the relationship between writing, acting and directing, into performance.

From History to ‘Ourstories’ in Martin Crimp’s Metanarratives

Even though Martin Crimp is now internationally recognized as one of the major trailblazers of recent and contemporary British theater, having consistently produced formally and textually groundbreaking work since the early 1980s, it is essential to acknowledge that his reputation has also been built on the innovative ways in which he has approached classical texts. Crimp’s representational methods are marked by a characteristic ease of combining the old with the new and the past with the present into a new state of co-existence; a continuum of experience lived, being lived and about to be lived. We have seen evidence of this in Crimp’s numerous translations for the stage, from Eugene Ionesco to Bernard-Marie Koltes which, as I have argued in The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (2012), have consistently fostered attention to cultural sensibilities, as well as social, political and historical specificities. This kind of sensitive intervention has been crucial in avoiding melting-pot translations that indiscriminately intermesh languages and traditions for the sake of simplified universal applicability. Negotiating past and present alongside different cultures on the understanding that history is the interconnecting, living and vibrating vein of humanity is not an easy task for any artist; this article examines how Crimp has handled this challenge in recent work.