The son of John Crimp, a British Rail signalling engineer, and his wife Jennie, Crimp's family moved in 1960 to Streatham where he attended a local primary school before winning a scholarship to Dulwich College. But when his father was transferred to York, he went to the nearby Pocklington School, where he showed an aptitude for languages, music, English literature, and theatre. He read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge (1975–78), where his first play Clang was staged by fellow student Roger Michell.[1] Before establishing himself as a playwright, he put together An Anatomy, a collection of short stories, and also wrote a novel Still Early Days. These remain unpublished.
His first six plays were performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. As he told Marsha Hanlon in an interview for the Orange Tree appeal brochure in 1991: "When the Orange Tree ran a workshop for local writers [in September 1981], I was invited to take part. The carrot was the chance of a lunchtime production, so I wrote Living Remains and the Orange Tree staged it – my first-ever produced play! I was so excited that I didn't think about the space where it was performed [then a room above a pub], but now I realise that the Orange Tree's intimacy and simplicity provided an extra layer of excitement."
Seven of his plays, and his second Ionesco translation have also been presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where he became writer-in-residence in 1997.
Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life, which premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1997, was described by critic Aleks Sierz as the "event that secured his reputation as the most innovative, most exciting, and most exportable playwright of his generation" [Sierz, Aleks, Aleks, (2013) p.48].[1] The play presents a unique structure, as none of the lines are assigned to specific characters, and Crimp does not specify the number of actors required to perform the piece. The play consists of seventeen seemingly unrelated scenes in which groups of people provide contradictory descriptions of an absent protagonist, a woman who is discussed as a terrorist, the daughter of grieving parents, an artist, and even a new car. Through its deliberate fragmentation, Attempts on Her Life challenges the audience to reconsider their understanding of what constitutes a "play" and raises questions about the existence of individuals beyond the constructs we create.
His other plays range from tragi-comic studies of suburban guilt and repression — Definitely the Bahamas (1987), Dealing with Clair (1989), The Country (2000) — via the satirical ‘entertainment’ In the Republic of Happiness (2012) — to powerful re-writings of Greek classics — Cruel & Tender (2004), The Rest Will Be Familiar to You from Cinema (2013). This unusual variety has led Vicky Angelaki to write:
Crimp’s multifaceted theatre, rich in textual, visual and visceral nuances, moves beyond rigid groupings of drama types and genres. What makes Crimp’s work both challenging and fascinating is its dual and equal focus on the private and the public, the collective and the individual, the humorous and the dramatic, the spoken and the unspoken. [Angelaki, Vicky (2012), The Plays of Martin Crimp, Palgrave Macmillan, page1][2]
Crimp's work has successfully received numerous productions abroad. In Germany, he is considered to be "one of the most respected British playwrights" and it was reported in 2013 that there has been "more than 60 German-language productions of his work in the past two decades."[3]
In 2021, Crimp was recipient of Germany’s Nyssen-Bansemer theater prize in recognition of the importance of his body of work. [Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29 March 2021][4] Writing about the prize in Theater heute magazine, Till Briegleb praises the way that “With great authority, Crimp sketches the most diverse victims of a bourgeois society that wants to ignore all connections between their tranquil existence and the violence that makes it possible. From the murderer to the child, everyone who appears is unique, their life-lies and fears individual.”[4]
Martin Crimp is sometimes described as a practitioner of the "in-yer-face" school of contemporary British drama, although he rejects the label.[5]
In 2022, he performed his play Not one of these people, which gave voice to 299 different characters. Supported with a live deepfake video generator, imagined by Quebec director Christian Lapointe, the playwright accepted Lapointe’s invitation to perform as an actor on stage for the first time.[6]
From 1997 onwards, Crimp has had a parallel career as theatre translator, making his first impact at the Royal Court Theatre with a translation of Ionesco’s The Chairs, a production that subsequently transferred to Broadway. His re-writings of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1996, revived 2009)[7] and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (2019/22) were both commercially and critically successful, the latter transferring from London’s West End to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.[8] These rewritings have led some critics to see them as new plays. Angelaki, for example, argues that『Crimp’s radical adaptations … depart substantially from the early versions of the texts that inspire them and as such belong to a discussion of Crimp’s playwriting canon, rather than of his translations or versions』[Angelaki, Vicky, Op. Cit. page 154][2]
When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other: 12 Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, ("provoked" by Richardson's Pamela, National Theatre, Dorfman, 2019)[10]
