Vicki Angelaki's The Plays of Martin Crimp is the first monograph to bring an original scholarly approach to Crimp's unusual and challenging body of work. While Aleks Sierz's The Theatre of Martin Crimp (2006) is a valuable introduction to this playwright, Angelaki moves the exegesis of Crimp's formal theatrical experimentation onto more critically rigorous ground.

Angelaki's chief theoretical tool is the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Angelaki, phenomenology is a tool for the appreciation of sensory experience itself and for the overcoming of binary opposites, such as the corporeal and the intellectual. As such, phenomenology is ideally suited to the appreciation of theatre, which trespasses so productively between the material and the mental, the body and the mind, the public and the private, and the individual and the social. In Angelaki's argument, the unique pleasures of Crimp's theatre are to be found in the conflation or the overcoming of just such binaries.

Angelaki's argument is structured thematically, and each chapter groups together plays from throughout Crimp's career thus far. One effect of this is a slight historical deracination of the plays, leaving the reader wondering at times whether Crimp's plays of the 1980s have a tangibly different attitude towards their social context than his plays of the 1990s onwards. Throughout her analysis, Angelaki describes Crimp's theatre as actively involved in the ‘defamiliarization’ of unexamined and quotidian aspects of middle-class existence, which are estranged through Crimp's bizarre and playful tinkering with dramatic form and eschewing of narrative linearity. The word ‘defamiliarization’ evokes, on the one hand, Shklovsky's focus on the formal, aesthetic qualities of art as a means of renewing the act of perception itself, and, on the other, Brecht's insistence that by estranging a subject we can see it from a politicized perspective. Angelaki walks a delicate line between these two approaches. She describes Crimp's theatre as engaged in a political phenomenology that nevertheless resists the blunt didacticism of either Brechtian political theatre or the English ‘state-of-the-nation’ play. Instead, in Crimp's dramatic world, it is questions rather than answers that come to the fore, and neither characters nor audience can exist in a state of certainty.

While Angelaki acknowledges that the challenging openness of Crimp's plays means that a scholar cannot in fairness speak definitively of the ‘meaning’ of his theatrical coups, Angelaki nevertheless leans consistently towards a politicized reading, and interprets his characters as anchorless selves adrift in a postmodern world of commodities and blurred signification. A portrait emerges of Crimp as a non-political playwright who somehow still writes plays that are critical of class structures, capitalism, power relations and the commodification of the self. This is an important, if at times tenuous, assessment of an artist who, throughout his career to date, has been willing to forge his own unique path.