Introduction: Dealing with Martin Crimp

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Notes

1. The Special Issue editors would like to express their gratitude to all the academic authors who have contributed articles to this Special Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, and to Dominic Cooke, Andrew Haydon, Roald van Oosten and Sam Walters for their generous responses. We are also very grateful to Dominic Johnson for his insightful editorial guidance, as well as to Maria Delgado and Aoife Monks for their support.

2. Aleks Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp (London: Methuen, 2006) and Vicky Angelaki The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

3. For a discussion of Crimp’s plays in Australia, see Vicky Angelaki, ‘Martin Crimp and Border Crossing: The Australian Turn’, Contemporary Theatre Review 21.4 (2011), 544-46. While there have been productions of Crimp’s plays in the US and Canada, the number pales in comparison to the attention his work has received in Europe and Australia. This is not uncommon when we compare Crimp to other contemporary playwrights based in the UK, whose work has also found a notably bigger audience in Europe than it has in the US, even in a context where it is mostly presented in translation.

4. Martin Crimp, ‘When the Actor Pulls Out’, in Four Unwelcome Thoughts, in Plays Two (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. vii-xiv (pp. vii-viii); the text for ‘Acceleration’ forms part of the published playtext of In the Republic of Happiness (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 46.

5. Nübling has directed a number of plays by Stephens in German-speaking Europe as well as for international theatre festivals and touring productions. His collaborations with Stephens on Pornography Pornografie, (2007), Three Kingdoms (2011) and, more recently, Carmen Disruption (2014) were instrumental to a working pattern that involved director and playwright developing the new project together. In all these cases, the product of the collaboration received its premiere production outside of the UK.