The Plays of Martin Crimp

The book focuses on Martin Crimp's plays, translations, adaptations and versions from 1985 to the present. It contends that Crimp's is a theatre of radical defamiliarization and proposes that to understand how this materializes both textually and in performance we need to refresh our understanding of the term. The book therefore draws upon phenomenology to locate the intensity and efficacy of Crimp's writing. Each chapter focuses on case studies contextualized in relation to other texts linked by their content so as to weave the inner narrative of Crimp's theatre. Through an examination of the rich, ambiguous content and formal experimentation of Crimp's work, the book proposes that defamiliarization in his plays serves to engage audiences in ideas relating to the commercialization of daily life, the artist's consumption by the entertainment industry, the inherent violence in domestic environments, the restrictiveness of social class, and the understanding of a nation's own identity through its encounter with the Other.