Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley have starred in his bleakly funny, sometimes dowright horrible plays. As The Treatment is revived at the Almeida, Martin Crimp talks about how his work can scandalise and surprise The first volume of Martin Crimp’s collected plays begins, not with plays, but with a few tantalising fragments of prose. In one, the narrator describes being invaded by a figure balefully called “the Writer”. The Writer smashes up the narrator’s house, ruins his piano, steals his electric toothbrush. Worst of all are the things he writes. “How can someone who spends so many hours watching the trees change colour, or children skipping, come up with all that pain and brutality?”, the narrator pleads. “Isn’t it perverse?” In the 35-odd years Crimp has been working, the question has often been asked. Oblique and elusive, his plays occupy a universe not fully like our own – a place sometimes alienating, often bleakly funny, occasionally downright horrible. It’s hard to say how they achieve this effect, except that they embody something first realised by the Greek tragedians: that what we fear is what we can’t exactly see. Asked once to explain what lay behind the cruelty in his works, Crimp replied crisply that “dialogue is inherently cruel”. Continue reading...
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com |