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.

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.

[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.

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.

page 154][2] In 2006, Crimp began a collaboration with composer George Benjamin that has led to the creation of three operas: Into the Little Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2018).