Political drama - Aleks Sierz meets Martin Crimp, a political playwright who doesn't depend on reportage

The futurist Filippo Marinetti once advocated the use of sneezing powder to wake up somnolent audiences. It is hard, looking around the stalls during recent, often overhyped productions of political theatre, not to feel that today we need a similar wake-up call. For although there is lots of political drama, it is almost all the same. Plays such as David Hare's Stuff Happens, Robin Soans's Talking to Terrorists and Bloody Sunday: scenes from the Saville inquiry are interesting in content but, being verbatim theatre, somewhat unexciting in form. What is missing is a wilder, more off-the-wall engagement. Instead of mimicking journalism, theatre needs to use metaphor and imagery to awaken our imaginations. Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies looks at today's anxieties in a refreshingly, det-erminedly unliteral manner. Consisting of three separate scenes, the play shows anonymous characters - time and place unspecified - discussing various scenarios. In the third scene they invent a story about a family of shining, happy people who isolate themselves from a riot outside. As they discuss "things improving" and "fewer emergencies", however, their complacency is brutally shattered.

Fewer Emergencies has deliberately ambiguous narratives: they might be ideas for a film, conversations among friends or improvised scenes for actors. The stories mutate under pressure of fear or violence. During one conversation about a massacre of schoolchildren, the narrative suddenly turns into a twelve-bar blues.

Crimp wrote two of the three scenes on 10 September 2001. "It was very odd, because I was writing a play about the threat to the culture of contentment, and the next day we see an act which embo-dies precisely that threat. That was quite strange. Recently I read a Japanese writer describe the novelist as a canary in a cage; and I felt as if I'd picked up this change in atmosphere."

Crimp, 49, an intense and bony-faced man with a sweep of long grey hair, has the temperament of a perfectionist. Not for him the seductions of simple generalisations. Despite his reputation as the outstanding playwright of his generation - he was the late Sarah Kane's favourite writer - he is uncomfortable in interviews. His characteristic gesture is a despairing hand to the forehead.

He came to prominence in 1988 on writing Dealing With Clair, the first of several elliptical studies showing how everyday life pulses with hidden dangers. In 1997, Attempts on Her Life blew apart theatrical form by describing a character called Anne from several angles, as a terrorist, a porn star, a survivalist and, most memorably, as a new make of car. Last year, Cruel and Tender, his adaptation of Sophocles's Women of Trachis, was an international hit. That play updated the Greek tragedy to the contemporary war on terror, but instead of describing the Middle East, Crimp set its off-stage horrors in Africa.

"I was concerned not to reduce the play to an anti-war diatribe, and I suppose that's one reason why I shifted its axis from north to south. The city that's being destroyed in the name of a war on terror is African because I wanted to create an imaginative space." But, although pure invention, it could not fail to resonate. "It would be irresponsible to avoid making a connection," he says. Indeed, the last scene of Cruel and Tender showed a politician attempting to distance himself from the actions of the military, which was exactly what was happening, daily, with Donald Rumsfeld and Geoff Hoon.

Crimp describes Fewer Emergencies as "three fables united by threats to the culture of contentment. They explore different kinds of anxiety about the fault line between the haves and the have-nots." Citing Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, a book that explores the restrictions of the minimum wage, he discusses how, in his view, social mobility in Britain has ground to a halt. "People are not having relationships with people from other parts of society." Yet the play is anything but a tract. Does he prefer the oblique approach? "I haven't seen any verbatim drama, because I don't have much time for that kind of theatre. For me, the writer's job is to imagine and it's the journalist's job to report. I'm always looking for the angle of vision, or the degree of refraction - I tell the actors that Fewer Emergencies is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope."

The stage play itself was inspired by experiences in Zurich, where he came across an anti-globalisation demonstration and inadvertently got tear-gassed. "It made me think of Bunuel," Crimp recalls. "He spent half his life championing revolutionary acts and when they were actually happening outside his window he felt ashamed because he realised that what he really wanted was order, not chaos." This glimpse of chaos in Zurich fed the drama's idea of a rioting underclass. "I would say that [my plays] emit criticism in the way that uranium emits radio- activity," he says, "but uranium also has many other qualities."

In April 2003, during the Iraq war, Crimp wrote Advice to Iraqi Women. Once again, he took an indirect, satirical approach: the piece is a list of ways to protect your children. "I felt strongly that the war was wrong. But I didn't want to write agitprop. It's a question of my temperament - I always want to take the devious route," he says, laughing. Before he wrote it, he had noticed how a playschool in a Victorian church had tied rubber over its shoe scrapers to protect the kids. "There was this gulf between how we protect our children and how futile it would be to protect a child if you were being bombed by a superpower." Although he parries any questions about his use of metaphor, Crimp's conversation is full of it. "You should use your imagination as strongly as you possibly can. You have to be like one of these vicious dogs which, once it grabs hold, won't let go. Take an image, grip it with your teeth, and worry away until you've got everything out of it."

Fewer Emergencies opens at the Royal Court Theatre, London SW1, on 8 September (box office: 020 7565 5000)

Recent political docudramas

2005
Bloody Sunday: scenes from the Saville inquiry: Richard Norton-Taylor
My Name Is Rachel Corrie (peace protests in Palestine): adapted by Katharine Viner

2004
Stuff Happens (Iraq war): David Hare
Guantanamo: honour-bound to defend freedom: adapted by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo

2003

The Permanent Way (railway privatisation): David Hare

Justifying War: scenes from the Hutton inquiry: Richard Norton-Taylor

Come Out Eli - an account of Britain's longest siege: Alecky Blythe

1999
The Colour of Justice - the Stephen Lawrence inquiry drama: Richard Norton-Taylor

1996
Nuremberg: the war crimes trial: Richard Norton Taylor

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