ABSTRACT
However successful his theatre, Martin Crimp's writing has never been about one genre alone, from his early days as an author, to the more recent years that have produced a wider diversification of his output, particularly evident through his opera work. In 2019, the publication, as a collection, of Writing for Nothing, which holds together Crimp's opera texts, fiction, as well as shorter plays, consolidated the existence of this other, sometimes less visible, body of work. Crimp's longer-form short story (running at thirty-six pages) is significant and highly relevant to the context of this book, because it captures the author's engagement with intertextuality, with gender power politics and with irritative – and irritable – marriages equally. The anthological nature of Writing for Nothing allows themes that relate to sexual and gendered tension, repression, oppression, and suppression to emerge particularly strongly and from different angles.
