The Theatre of Martin Crimp

Second Edition

Aleks Sierz

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781408183779
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en théâtre

First published in 2006, Alek's Sierz's The Theatre of Martin Crimp provided a groundbreaking study of one of British theatre's leading contemporary playwrights. Combining Sierz's lucid prose and sharp analysis together with interviews with Martin Crimp and a host of directors and actors who have produced the work, it offered a richly rewarding and engaging assessment of this acutely satirical playwright. The second edition additionally explores the work produced between 2006 and 2013, both the major new plays and the translations and other work. The second edition considers The City, the 2008 companion play to The Country, Play House from 2012 and the new work for the Royal Court in late 2012. The two works that have brought Crimp considerable international acclaim in recent years, the updated rewrite of Th e Misanthrope which in 2009 played for several months in the West End starring Keira Knightley, and Crimp's translation of Botho Strauss's Big and Small (Barbican, 2012), together with Crimp's other work in translation are all covered. The Theatre of Martin Crimp remains the fullest, most readable account of Crimps's work for the stage.

1 ‘A KNOCK AT THE DOOR’

Living Remains, Four Attempted Acts, A Variety of Death-Defying Acts, Definitely the Bahamas, Dealing with Clair, Play with Repeats

Martin Crimp started his writing life on the fringe. During the 1980s, the Orange Tree Theatre, a small venue not far from his home in Richmond, produced six of his plays and, despite its small subsidy, even paid him for them. Set up in 1971 by Sam Walters, who has been its artistic director ever since, this was at first a lunchtime theatre showing a mix of new plays and revivals, with an eye on both the local community and wider European politics, especially those of Eastern Europe.¹ True to its origins as part of the alternative theatre movement, its political radicalism was expressed through its promotion of writers such as Václav Havel, who set up Charter 77 as a forum for democracy in Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia. By the early 1980s, despite pressure on alternative theatre from Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, whose arts policies were distinguished by cost-cutting and subsidy-slashing, the Orange Tree managed to survive as one of three London venues which produced ‘their own lunchtime shows as opposed to renting out their space’.² Later, it also staged plays in the evening. But chance also played a part in kick-starting Crimp’s career. In 1981, Walters employed Anthony Clark as an assistant director, and one of his jobs was to read the backlog of plays that had been submitted – including an unsolicited manuscript from Crimp. Walters remembers that ‘My first glimpse of Martin was in our office in Hill Street. There was a knock at the door and this man with burning eyes came in and said, “I’m a writer, I live locally and I’ve got a play.” And I remember this man handing in his play. And that went straight to Tony [Clark].’³ Clark set up a writers’ workshop in 1981, invited Crimp to join, and planned his first season of new plays for summer 1982.

Crimp’s professional debut, however, was actually a translation which reflected the theatre’s concern with Eastern European dictatorships. In April 1982, the Orange Tree staged Love Games, by Polish playwright Jerzy Przezdziecki, in a version co-written by Crimp and Howard Curtis from a feeble translation by Boguslaw Lawendowski. This two-hander examines the domestic strains on one young couple – He and She – imposed by the chronic housing shortage in Communist Poland. In order to meet in private, they have to borrow the flat of one of their friends. At one point, He says that living in Poland is so absurd that it’s ‘like living in a play’; to which She replies, ‘I just want a life of my own.’⁴ Partly a marital comedy, partly a political metaphor for a country in turmoil, the ninety-minute piece was directed by Clark, with actors Sian Thomas and David Moylan. Clark stressed its politics by having a Communist hammer-and-sickle poster on one wall and a Solidarność poster (with the word written as a logo showing a group of striking workers) on another. As well as having lunchtime performances, the play was presented in the evening and attracted national newspaper critics. The Guardian’s Michael Billington saw it as ‘a refreshingly direct account’ and said that while it was ‘very good on domestic in-fighting, the piece becomes heavily prankish when it lapses into fantasy’.⁵ Still, there’s something prescient about Crimp starting his career with a play which made its political points by means of metaphor rather than by preaching, and there’s also something just a little bit Beckettian about this parable of people enduring the unendurable.

Living Remains

The same could be said of Crimp’s first solo play, Living Remains, which came out of the Orange Tree’s writers’ workshops and was staged as one of ‘two new plays for lunchtime’ in July 1982.⁶ In this monologue, Woman, a bag lady who is ‘older rather than younger’, and who smokes dog-ends from a tin, visits her hospitalised husband, who is too sick to speak and can only communicate by pressing a buzzer, once for Yes and twice for No.⁷ After some banter, Woman tells him that she’s met a Mr Cook, a ‘corpulent’ (p. 4) upper-class gent, in a nearby cemetery, and that he has invited her to visit him at his country estate. She’s come to ask her husband’s permission. The play ends with her asking again and again, but getting only silence in reply. Written with immense attention to language, it’s a short but powerful piece which is suffused with ambiguity: it’s unclear whether Woman’s meeting with Mr Cook is a fantasy or not, and the full force of her impatience with her husband is concealed in the subtext.⁸ Performed by Auriol Smith, Walters’ wife, the forty-minute monologue was directed by Clark. Living Remains has a distinctly Beckettian feel, with its Woman tramp wearing ‘a threadbare black dress which must once have been elegant, shoes which do not match, and an elaborate hat’ (p. 1), and there is evidence of Beckett’s inspiration in some of the text’s repetition, and its wordplay. So, after having begun his career with a highly topical play, Crimp turned his back on the contemporary in order to explore a symbolic, or absurdist, landscape of cruel personal relationships.

Meanwhile, beyond the Orange Tree, Thatcher’s policies were remaking the world in her own cruel image. In terms of economic, social and political change, 1980s Britain was summed up by pictures of burning cars in inner-city riots from Brixton to Toxteth; robots making cars at Dagenham; pitched battles between workers and police during the miners’ strike of 1984; City stockbrokers sporting huge mobile phones; increased numbers of beggars and people sleeping rough. Nostalgia was satisfied by the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di in July 1981. Abroad, the Falklands War of June 1982 encouraged jingoism and a pugnacious approach to foreign policy. In 1986, the globalisation of the economy got a spectacular boost when, during the Big Bang, the City of London Stock Exchange was fully computerised and integrated into the world financial markets. Share-owning became common. Telephones, airports, gas, oil, electricity and water were privatised. Trade union membership slumped. Thatcherism caused mass unemployment – from 1.3 million to 2 million in her first year of government, rising to 3 million plus in 1982 – and the destruction of heavy industries. As the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened, the social consequences included a massive rise in poverty.⁹ Yet, by 1987, two-thirds of the population owned their own home, and liberal intellectuals contented themselves with wryly quoting Yeats: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’¹⁰

Many theatres responded directly to the new climate. Writers such as Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill took the temperature of the times: in Bond’s The Worlds (1979), a character says: ‘Money can do anything. It gives you the power of giants. The real world obeys the law of money,’ and Churchill’s Marlene in Top Girls (1982) expresses a popular view of Thatcher: ‘Get the economy back on its feet and whoosh. She’s a tough lady, Maggie.’¹¹ While Thatcherism was attacked by Steven Berkoff’s Sink the Belgrano! (1986) and Alan Ayckbourn’s A Small Family Business (1987), the Left was criticised in David Edgar’s Maydays (1983), and the British love of history indulged in Julian Mitchell’s Another Country (1981) and Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985). As theatres struggled with funding cuts, a new generation of female playwrights, such as Sarah Daniels, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Charlotte Keatley, took theatre form apart. Others, such as Terry Johnson and Robert Holman, crept on to the scene. At the National, David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda (1985) satirised the new press barons while at the Royal Court Churchill gave City yuppies the same treatment in Serious Money (1987). Pinter took a political turn, with work such as One for the Road (1985) attacking human rights violations around the world. But most lurid of all was Jim Cartwright, in whose Road (1986) Carol says: ‘Poverty wants me. He’s in my hair and clothes. He comes dust on me knickers. [. . .] Nowt’s nice around me.’¹² But such overt expressions of economic, social and political reality were anathema to the young Crimp. His early work glanced obliquely, if at all, at the world outside his suburban flat. He had a different agenda.

Four Attempted Acts

Crimp’s next Orange Tree outing was Four Attempted Acts, a quartet of short plays staged in October 1984, after a successful reading in May.¹³ These comprised The Appreciation of Music, Making Love, Taking Leave and Suicide. Each of them create an imaginary world which is a far cry from the social realism so common on most British stages at the time. The Appreciation of Music, therefore, shows a tweedy Mr Lebrun demonstrating to Mrs Cook how a laboratory guinea pig can be trained through ‘trial, and error’ (p. 6); Making Love is about Mr De A giving dental treatment to a gasping Mrs Lebrun offstage while Lucy, his assistant, lazily leafs through some magazines and half-heartedly attempts some physical exercises; Taking Leave features Yvonne, Mr De A’s former assistant, telling her lover on the phone that she plans to leave him; Suicide sees Mrs De A showing off her daughter Rose’s inept musical skills to the conservatory’s Dr Lebrun. All of these pieces pun on the word ‘attempts’: they show their characters attempting to impress others as well as themselves being attempts at telling short stories. Indeed, these playlets, Crimp notes in his stage directions, ‘are best attempted on a small stage’. And they all revel in ambiguity. Mrs Cook would like to appreciate music, but she mistakes cruelty for art: ‘The exquisite pain of it [. . .] A moment’s Mozart and I’m at screaming pitch’ (p. 13). In Making Love, it seems at first that Mrs Lebrun’s offstage gasps are of sexual pleasure rather than dental pain. And the title refers to an outrageous story about Yvonne, Mr De A’s former assistant, who was sacked after being raped by Mr Petley, another patient, in the waiting room, an incident the dentist insists was not a rape because she was giving ‘gasps of pleasure’. When she hears this, Mrs Lebrun asks: ‘But how can you distinguish?’ (p. 27). In Taking Leave, the victimised Yvonne is taking leave of her lover by phone, but the absurdism of the conversation also suggests that she’s taking leave of her senses. Suicide refers both to the death of Mrs De A’s husband and to her daughter’s self-destructive behaviour.

Directed by Michael Hucks, the cast of Four Attempted Acts was Del Henney (the men), Auriol Smith (the older women) and Liz Crowther (the young women). London critics reported that ‘Crimp offers us an extremely elegant piece in a form that is to theatre what the essay is to literature; it’s commentary rather than the main thing but oddly compulsive for all that’, and praised it as ‘witty, puzzling and often quite disturbing’.¹⁴ Four Attempted Acts is clearly an apprentice work, but it is also a wicked little gem of an entertainment. Originally written for radio, at first it had three scenarios – The Appreciation of Music, Making Love and Suicide – and was broadcast as Three Attempted Acts on BBC radio in May 1985. When Crimp created the stage version he added a playlet, Taking Leave, which depends on a visual gag: as Yvonne chats on the phone, a man quietly arrives and puts his arms around her, thus proving her lover’s jealous fantasies to be true. Three Attempted Acts won the Giles Cooper Award for best radio play of 1985, and Crimp was encouraged to continue writing.

By 1985, the spirit of the alternative fringe theatre – which had taken such a battering from Thatcherism – had been quietly dampened, but the theatres that had sprung up in the early 1970s could boast of one achievement: they had survived. ‘The London fringe, which had struggled to adapt to an environment where recession and political disillusionment had dulled the appetite for didactic theatre, also began to show signs of revival.’¹⁵ And Crimp’s local theatre, the Orange Tree, was part of this revival.

A Variety of Death-Defying Acts

In December 1985, the Orange Tree chose Crimp’s A Variety of Death-Defying Acts as its Christmas show. The play’s full title, reminiscent of the Beatles song ‘For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ from the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band album (1967), gives a flavour of its style: A Variety of Death-Defying Acts performed for the amusement and sensation of the general public by Petley’s original travelling troupe without a net and featuring the incomparable Miss Alison.¹⁶ In this surreal comedy, Petley’s Circus comes to town and turns the Grand Guignol café into its home. Characters include bossman Mr Petley, a sleepwalking ex-high-wire act called Miss Alison, a Bearded Lady, a Strongman, and a couple of clowns. A local woman, Miss Kopinski, is attracted to them, and the play ends with the Bearded Lady and Strongman leaving the circus to get married, while the clowns butcher Petley in an illusionist’s knife box. If the circus is a metaphor for the theatre, the play’s highlights are the absurdist clowns who, dressed as policemen, spend their time philosophising about the nature of crime and guilt.

Directed by Sam Walters, the cast of A Variety of Death-Defying Acts included Crimp regulars Auriol Smith and Liz Crowther, plus some hectic clowning by Barry Killerby, who in 1993 was to find fame as the children’s TV character Mr Blobby. City Limits said: ‘This odd-ball comedy by talented local writer, Martin Crimp, juggles mataphysics [sic] with farce to achieve an unusual seasonal show with a serious edge that examines the thin dividing line between the normal and the freak,’ while Time Out pointed out that when Crimp lobs lines such as ‘What does it all mean?’ and ‘It’s a little contrived’ at the audience, ‘it’s tempting to lob them back’.¹⁷ Despite some satirical moments, such as the 1st Clown’s discussion about the way life resembles a play, A Variety of Death-Defying Acts was an experiment in blatant absurdism and knockabout comedy that Crimp never pursued again. On the other hand, the production did him no harm, and he was evidently making his mark within the theatre – the programme lists him as a member of its ‘artistic committee’.¹⁸ Despite this, he was absent from the stage in 1986, although his next radio play, Six Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, influenced by Beckett’s 1957 radio drama All That Fall, was broadcast on the BBC in December. Clearly, ‘his early work for radio sharpened his sensitivity for the rhythm and music of the language’.¹⁹

Definitely the Bahamas

If A Variety of Death-Defying Acts was an artistic dead end, Crimp returned to form in September 1987 with a trilogy of pieces called Definitely the Bahamas. The origins of the stage version emphasises how important radio was to his developing career. Crimp wrote Definitely the Bahamas as a radio play in spring 1986, when it won the annual Radio Times Drama Award. Then, as he prepared a stage version, he got an unexpected boost from actor Alec McCowen, who agreed to direct it. At the height of his career and about to star in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the National Theatre, McCowen knew Crimp’s work because he had been in his first radio play, Three Attempted Acts. He ‘liked [Crimp’s] style of writing’, and so accepted Walters’ invitation to direct Defini...