Play with repeats

During the Comedy Festival in 2004, the Tristero theatre company from Brussels presented the unique, critical soap-opera Abigail’s Party by the British writer and film-maker, Mike Leigh. Tristero’s new piece is Play with repeats by Martin Crimp, one of the most discerning contemporary writers who – yet again - hails from Great Britain. Crimp’s plays describe our turbulent world with humour and ruthless precision. 

‘If only I could go back in time! If only I could start my life again knowing what I know now.’ We all occasionally dream of this. As does Tony. On the eve of his fortieth birthday he makes up the balance of his life. In his view, his career and love-life have failed. In an attempt to rectify these failures, that same night he decides to go to an African marabout. Tony wants his help to go back in time so that he can relive all the crucial moments in his life. But is a second chance always a guarantee of success?  

‘Crimp writes in the tradition of British playwrights like Coward, Orton and especially Pinter: the characters live in a middle-class world, the plots have an inner logic and the dialogues are ingeniously constructed. They are all ‘well-made plays’. The plays he wrote up to 1993 show a dramatic unity, a thematic and stylistic coherence which was later upset by the publication of Attempts on her life. From then on his aim was to cover new ground in a search for what he describes as ‘the disintegration of the dramatic form’.

‘In our view Crimp is one of the best contemporary dramatists. In all his plays he manages to tell us something about the world we live in in a way that is critical but also subtle. We can wholly identify with the way he combines humour and melancholy in order to confront the spectator with meaningful questions. Crimp’s dramaturgy can only be described as contemporary: materialism, social decline and a lack of idealism and moral values are some of the themes he touches on in his work. His fantasy and writing style stimulate us and through his work we experience the author as a sort of ‘kindred spirit’ in our search for how and why we make theatre. We share his predilection for the unexpected, his comments on the function of culture, his experiments with or ridicule of ironic approach to theatre forms. Which is why we intend to do more than just this one play of his.’