Analysis Of Martin Crimp's In The Republic Of Happiness

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A shift in the spotlight had occurred on the 1990’s British stage. Within this new In-Yer-Face or New Brutalism-dubbed wave, playwrights—in writing and showcasing their plays—preferred a more explicit and uncensored language as a means of conveying what they saw, felt, and thought, as well as exhibiting the cutthroat events and cutthroat people of a modern society. Among the many writers of this wave is Martin Crimp, who openly and ruthlessly reflects the society and culture within which he lives in a rather blunt tone onto his works through his use of uncensored language and his realistic point of view. This paper has examined how the female characters of Crimp’s In The Republic of Happiness have been reflected through the lens of Materialist …show more content…

Furthermore, Crimp has moulded female characters that move forward with their lives and whose sense of what a beautiful and well-groomed woman fails to cease in spite of the traumas they have …show more content…

Crimp, as he has stated at the beginning of his play, almost immediately lays out before the eye the artificiality of the Kodak happy family congregated around an artificial tree. As is very much present in Crimp’s other plays whereby the habits and demands of contemporary have changed, in this play too we feel his negative outlook towards humanity. Crimp in In The Republic of Happiness uses stark and simple language. However, all though his characters’ language is plain, the constant repetition of the same words conveys dialogues that whirlwind around the characters’ emotional intensity. The play is comprised of three different acts and a total of 8 characters—five of whom are women. In the first act, or Deconstruction of the Family, this members of this family who has collected together for Christmas dinner airs their secrets. The characters Dad and Mum, their two daughters Hazel and Debbie, and their grandparents live together. At the very beginning of the play, we learn that Debbie—who tells of how much she loves her family—is pregnant and that her family does not quite accept this due to her pregnancy being out of wedlock. Hazel, the little sister, is jealous of her elder sister under the excuse that her sister had always wanted to be pregnant and thus scorns her getting

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