Martin Crimp

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Martin Crimp (born February 14, 1956, Dartford, Kent, Great Britain) is a British playwright.

Sometimes described as a practitioner of the in-yer-face school of contemporary British theatre, though this is a label he rejects, Crimp is notable for the astringency of his dialogue, a tone of emotional detachment, a bleak view of human relationships — none of his characters experience love or joy -- and latterly, a concern for theatrical form and language rather than an interest in narrative.

Frequently performed in Europe, he has also been an assiduous translator of European texts. Six of his plays have been presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where he was writer-in-residence in 1997. Before establishing himself as a playwright, he published An Anatomy (a collection of short stories) and Early Days (a novel).

Possibly his most highly-regarded, and certainly his boldest and most innovative play is Attempts on Her Life, first performed at the Royal Court in 1997 and subsequently translated into twenty languages. In this work, none of the lines are assigned to a particular character, nor does Crimp specify how many actors should perform the piece. In seventeen apparently disconnected scenes, groups of people give mutually contradictory descriptions of an absent protagonist, a woman talked of as if she were, variously, a terrorist, the daughter of grieving parents, an artist and a new car. This deliberately fragmented work challenges an audience to re-define its notion of what constitutes a 'play' and might seem to question whether someone has any existence beyond the models we construct.