‘Didn’t see anything, love. Sorry’: Martin Crimp’s Theatre of Denial

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Notes

1. Martin Crimp, Dealing with Clair, in Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 7–98 (p. 17).

2. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1956–74), XIX (1961), pp. 139–45 (pp. 143–44).

3. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetichism’, in Standard Edition, XXI (1961) pp. 152–57 (p. 154).

4. Octave Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’, in Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), pp. 9–33.

5. Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 5.

6. Martin Crimp, Getting Attention, in Plays One, pp. 105–75 (p. 149).

7. Epistrophe indicates a repetition of the same word or expression at the end of successive clauses.

8. Crimp, Getting Attention, p. 151.

9. Martin Crimp, Play House and Definitely the Bahamas (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), pp. 37–73 (p. 43).

10. Bruce Bégout, La Découverte du quotidien (Paris: Allia, 2005), p. 440. Author’s translation.

11. Crimp, Definitely the Bahamas, p. 49.

12. Crimp, Four Imaginary Characters in Plays One, p. vii–xii (p. vii).

13. Crimp, Dealing with Clair, p. 31.

14. The anaphoric pronoun refers to an antecedent, as is the case in the following dialogue between Milly and Carol taken from Dealing with Clair, ‘I don’t want his dinner to get cold / I can microwave it’ (p. 160), in which the pronoun clearly refers back to the noun ‘dinner’.

15. Crimp, Getting Attention, pp. 164–65.

16. Crimp’s approach indeed differs from that of playwrights such as Tim Crouch, Mark Ravenhill, or Philip Ridley, who often spare no details in their depiction of domestic violence. An example can be drawn from Philip Ridley’s highly controversial play Mercury Fur (2005), in which the horrendous acts are perpetrated offstage yet the perverse Party Guest’s fantasies are recounted in detail. For further analysis of child abuse in contemporary theatre, see Helen Freshwater, ‘Children and the Limits of Representation in the Work of Tim Crouch’, in Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground, ed. by Vicky Angelaki (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 167–88.

17. Crimp, Definitely the Bahamas, p. 46.

18. Ibid., p. 69.

19. Harold Pinter, Complete Works: One (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1976), pp. 14–15. This is originally an excerpt from Pinter’s speech given at the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962.

20. Martin Crimp, The Country, in Plays Two (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 285–366 (p. 328).

21. I am voluntarily using the word ‘screen’ rather than ‘barrier’ here since Crimp objects to this label saying in an interview with Aleks Sierz that he ‘get[s] irritated when people, probably influenced by European philosophy, talk about language being a barrier to communication. And they ask me whether my plays are about a failure to communicate. And I always say, “No, I don’t think so.” They are all about communicating. Obviously, some of my characters would prefer, at certain moments, not to communicate, but that doesn’t mean they can’t’. Aleks Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp (London: Methuen, 2006), p. 105.

22. Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life, in Plays Two, pp. 197–284 (p. 229).

23. I am referring to Roman Jakobson’s definition of the six basic functions of language among which the referential function whose aim is to convey meaning. See Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Selected Writings III (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981), pp. 18–51.

24. Crimp, The Country, p. 309.

25. Crimp, Getting Attention, p. 165.

26. Martin Crimp, In the Republic of Happiness (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 36: ‘Yes I’m often in pain / there are days I weep / like a nymph by a stream – / but it doesn’t go deep / (no it never goes deep)’.

27. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

28. Crimp, In the Republic of Happiness, pp. 64–65.

29. Cohen, States of Denial, p. 7.

30. Crimp, Getting Attention, p. 105.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., p. 164.

33. Ibid., p. 168.

34. Ibid., p. 151.

35. Robert Altman’s film adaptation of Pinter’s plays The Room and The Dumb Waiter – entitled Basements (1987) – opens with a close-up of a newspaper which is then lowered to reveal the actor’s face. This question of the linguistic wall has been developed by Brigitte Gauthier in her book Harold Pinter: le maître de la fragmentation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).

36. Crimp, Getting Attention, p. 106.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 110.

39. Aloysia Rousseau, ‘L’horreur acoustique: musiques “anempathiques” dans le théâtre de Martin Crimp’, Sillages critiques, 16 (2013) <http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/2955> [accessed 10 January 2014]; and ‘“The Brighter and More Cheerful It Is, the More It Hurts”: Martin Crimp’s Darkly Disturbing Comedies’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 44 (2013) <http://ebc.revues.org/563> [accessed 10 January 2014].

40. For a detailed analysis of the function of the phone in Crimp’s The Country, see Peter Buse, ‘Sollicitations téléphoniques: La Campagne de Martin Crimp’, trans. by Emmanuelle Guedj in Le Théâtre anglais contemporain (1985–2005), ed. by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Nicole Boireau (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007); see also Vicky Angelaki, The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 118.

41. Crimp, The Country, p. 307.

42. Ibid., p. 314.

43. Crimp admits to perceiving the telephone as a threatening element: ‘I’ve always hated the phone. I always get someone else to answer if I can. For me, it’s always an instrument of doom. I’ve always found writing phone calls tempting, and difficult’. Cited in Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, pp. 105–06.

44. Crimp, The Country, p. 307, p. 366.

45. Ibid., p. 366.

46. Crimp, In the Republic of Happiness, p. 59.

47. Crimp, The Country, p. 333.

48. Crimp, Getting Attention, p. 138. See Angelaki, The Plays of Martin Crimp, pp. 94–95.

49. Crimp, Definitely the Bahamas, p. 37.

50. Crimp, Dealing with Clair, p. 88.

51. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 4.

52. J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 256.

53. Ibid., p. 249.

54. This is what I have referred to as ‘generic oscillation’ in Rousseau, ‘“The Brighter and More Cheerful It Is”’.

55. Crimp, In the Republic of Happiness: ‘I’m talking about your indiscretion, (Takes his hand.) I’m not talking about luggage – yes sexually he’s all over the place […] – isn’t that right, girls? (Approaching Hazel.) I’ll bet he’s had this one already – did it hurt? – did he leave marks?’, p. 34.

56. Ibid., p. 34.

57. Heiner Zimmermann, ‘Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life: Postdramatic, Postmodern, Satiric?’, in Contemporary Drama in English 9, ed. by Margaret Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), pp. 105–24 (p. 122).

58. Crimp, The Country, p. 53.