Élisabeth Angel-Perez - Böcker

This edited collection reflects on British playwright Martin Crimp (b. 1956) and his remarkable and multifaceted career in theatre and opera, offering an interdisciplinary, collaborative and internationalist analysis of one of the most unique authorial voices globally in the recent and contemporary period. While taking stock of Crimp’s output across different theatre and performance genres as well as cultural and production contexts, the volume’s contributors are motivated not merely by looking back, but by strongly engaging with the present and future of this extraordinary writer.The volume locates Crimp as a groundbreaking figure in literary and artistic traditions in the United Kingdom and beyond, all the while recognising that his output transcends categorisation and occupies a singular and distinctive space. Co-edited by Vicky Angelaki (Sweden), Élisabeth Angel-Perez (France) and Clara Escoda (Spain), three leading research experts in Martin Crimp Studies internationally, the volume additionally features contributions by a team of prominent academic authors whose individual work has also served to create and define this field across different literary, artistic and cultural contexts. A key feature of the book is a major new and extensive interview with Martin Crimp by Aleks Sierz, offering valuable elucidation of crucial aspects of Crimp’s writing and process.

It is a fact that today’s British stages resound with powerfully innovative voices and that, very often, these voices have been those of young women playwrights. This collection of essays gives visibility and pride of place to these fascinating voices by exploring the vitality, inventiveness and particularly strong relevance of these poetics. These women playwrights sometimes invent radically new forms and sometimes experiment with conventional ones in fresh and unexpected ways, as for example when they re-energize naturalism and provide it with new missions. The plays that are addressed are all concerned with the necessity to grasp the complexity of the contemporary world and to further investigate what it means to be human. Intimate or epic, and sometimes both at once, visionary or closer to everyday life, these plays approach the contemporary world through a multitude of prisms – historical, scientific, political and poetic – and open different and visionary perspectives.