ABSTRACT
If the past decade has been a very fruitful period for Martin Crimp overall, then 2018 and 2019 stand out as particularly exceptional years: 2018 saw the premieres of Men Asleep and Lessons in Love and Violence; 2019 began with When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other (subtitle: Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson's Pamela) and closed with Cyrano de Bergerac. In When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, conquest is a game; its outcomes are uncertain, risqué, even outright dangerous. In Cyrano de Bergerac, beyond existential woes on the mental and emotional sphere, desire is a matter of life and death: one endangers oneself physically in a way that actually entails threat to survival. In When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, it is expression that serves both as method and as objective: domination, that is, occurs most effectively in language over any other form.
