Category Archives: Martin Crimp

Other places

Posted on by
Home page at Guerrilla Semiotics.

Home page at Guerrilla Semiotics.

It’s Old Home Week in the comments section of my post “Theatre blogosphere dead; no services planned” from Tuesday (which, curiously, garnered even more page views than Monday’s post, the previous champion). A few others have appropriately longer-form responses, the most thoughtful of these being Jana Perkovic’s essay at her blog Guerrilla Semiotics. She takes a long view of the ways that the critical blogosphere affected theatre in Melbourne; she writes:

As long as criticism is understood as a practice external to the the arts, critics will be subjected to the same precarious work conditions, same reliance (for both income and professional standards) on a completely extraneous industry, and the critical output of the country will remain of low volume, and abysmal quality. And, as long as writing criticism is seen as hurting one’s standing within the arts industry, the ability of criticism to attract the most educated, insightful, and articulate voices will be further compromised. Theatre criticism in a country cannot function entirely as a kamikaze operation.

The future of criticism is almost certainly not in full-time employment, and very definitely not in writing for newspapers and magazines. It is also not in microblogging, not on Twitter, not in “vox populi”-style surveys, and definitely not in different aggregators and miscellaneous arts portals that have sprung up in recent years, combining advertising revenue with no writers’ fees, and producing criticism no longer or better than the average newspaper. Criticism requires long form, a critical culture requires dialogue. …

The only credible future vision we have right now is of quality criticism as a sometimes-job or part-time job, done by people who receive the majority of their income somewhere else, people not writing criticism for the glory and influence (a la Kenneth Tynan), but out of a sense of responsibility towards the theatre sector, and out of writerly joy. If it exists, it will be funded by a patchwork of different sources, public and private — or it will continue to be funded by self-exploitation.

That’s from the conclusion of the essay, and it’s important to see how Ms. Perkovic gets there from its beginning. You can read the whole post here.

In the meantime, Aleks Sierz (The Theatre of Martin Crimp) recently interviewed the author of In the Republic of Happiness, Crimp’s new play at the Royal Court, in “Martin Crimp in the Republic of Satire” for the Arts Desk. Sierz’s review of the show, published just this morning, is here.

Friday video: Another interview with Martin Crimp

Posted on by

Matilda Castrey and Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2008 Royal Court production of Martin Crimp's The City

More rare, perhaps, than a print interview with dramatist Martin Crimp is a video interview; the playwright himself speaks below, in a discussion from January 2011 in Geneva, Switzerland. In this interview, Crimp talks about the self-definition of a writer, the emergence of the city as a central motif in his plays, and the place of the dramatist in the rehearsal room.

An interview with Martin Crimp

Posted on by

Martin Crimp. Photo: Gautier DeBlond.

“His work is as austere as the age of austerity,” says Aleks Sierz, author of The Theatre of Martin Crimp, whose new interview with the playwright appeared at The Arts Desk on 10 March. The somewhat reclusive writer sat down with Sierz upon the occasion of the world premiere of his new play, Play House, at the Orange Tree Theatre, and the London opening of his translation of Botho Strauss’ Big and Small, which opens at the Barbican this week. I’m a great admirer of Crimp’s work — his plays Dealing with Clair, The City, and Fewer Emergencies are spare but brilliant examinations of a declining culture, and  Attempts on Her Life, a central influence on Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, remains criminally undervalued in the US even as Kane’s play is regularly remounted.

A few excerpts from the interview:

What were your influences?

(Pause.) To me, looking back, it’s obvious that I was heavily influenced by Beckett. Of course, that’s a really dangerous influence, but in some ways not a bad one. Better than no influence at all. (Pause.) At the same time, I think that something more personal to me was already present — I was going to call it satire, but maybe that’s not the right word. Jonathan Swift is, of course, another Irish writer I’ve always admired and continue to read. As an adolescent, I was also a big fan of Ionesco, and I must have put on all sorts of weird plays by him at school: The Lesson, The New Tenant, and a play about the character Macbett. But I was completely unaware of the new wave of —

Kitchen-sink?

No, not kitchen-sink. [Edward-]Bond-type plays. Angry plays. Political plays. Which I discovered much later. So I was coming from a place which seems to me now quite strange and isolated. At that time, living in Yorkshire, I read Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, books which I found in the York Book and Record Exchange. They didn’t always make sense to me; but they left a subliminal mark. As far as British drama was concerned there was definitely a 10-year time gap between me and everybody else. …

For me, dialogue is inherently cruel. There’s something inherently cruel about people talking to each other. And I don’t know what that is. My parents’ constant arguments as a child possibly have something to do with it. …

[Getting Attention] was an uncommissioned play and, at the time I wrote it, there were a number of influences. One was all the media reporting about child abuse. The second thing, which got up my nose, was that many well-known British novelists of the 1980s were becoming fathers, and, in response to fatherhood, they were becoming increasingly sentimental. I remember reading an interview with one of them, which talked about his wonderful study overlooking his lovely garden, and how he looked around “with concern,” when he heard his child, which was being looked after by its nanny, not, you will note, by him. My experience of having children was different. It was not sentimental. It was beautiful, but hard at the same time. When I wrote Getting Attention, I wanted to confront physical — and I mean physical rather than the more fashionable sexual abuse — and, at the same time, to explore satirically some of the discourse that surrounds it.

The full interview can be found here.