Violence, Testimony and Ethics in Martin Crimp’s The Country and The City

Abstract

On 11 April 2000, Martin Crimp’s The Country opened at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs. On 1 March 2008, eight years after The Country and standing in close dialogue with it, The City premiered at Berlin’s Schaubühne, shortly before opening at the Royal Court. Both The Country and The City have generally been seen as being conventional in form. Aleks Sierz, for instance, claims that, ‘having pushed the boundaries of theatrical possibility to the limit with Attempts on Her Life, Crimp’s next play, The Country, ostensibly [takes] a more traditional form’ (2006, p. 60). In the same vein, Martin Middeke suggests that the play ‘returns into the calmer, even if [ … ] more shallow waters of mainstream theatre’ (2011, p. 92). Regarding The City, Vicky Angelaki points out that it ‘retains a more conventional narrative structure than much of Crimp’s theatre’ (2012, p. 25). This chapter, in contrast, reads both The Country and The City as plays that set out, in Élisabeth Angel-Perez’s potent formulation, to ‘rethink the question of realism in the theatre’ and push theatrical boundaries as Crimp seeks to find a language and a type of dramaturgy that may enable him to ‘emerge out of the ethical and, therefore, aesthetic impasse’ brought about by the Holocaust, which has ‘plunged [contemporary art] into the so-called crisis of representation’ (2006, p. 24).¹