32 | 2018The Renewal of the Crime Play on the Contemporary Anglophone Stage

The expression "crime play" immediately brings to mind the formulaic whodunit in which a number of potential criminals are gathered in a drawing room waiting for the cunning sleuth to solve the mystery and unmask the murderer. But is this traditional form of detective drama - with its plot revolving solely around the question "who has done it?" and the play ending with that question necessarily being answered - the only kind of crime play that can be identified in contemporaru Anglophone theatre? The answer is of course no, as the wide diversity of plays studied in this issue of Coup de Théâtre exemplidies.

The articles collected in this volume attemps to address a gap in theatre and performance studies by showing how a number of playwrights and theatre companies have departed from the rigid and obsolete form of the draing-room thriller to offer new forms of crime plays that both celebrate and subvert the genre. The plays tackled in this volume show how playwrights and theatre compagnies have set out to renew the genre, blurring obsolete dichotomies and more particularly erasing the distinction between high and low culture.