In Crimp's Getting Attention (1991), Sharon never appears on the stage: the little girl is confined to her room, doomed to a tragic ending, thus foreshadowing the horrifying invisibility of Annushka in Attempts on Her Life (1997) whose mother says she is “in two bags”. Similarly, there seems to be no room left for the possibly schizophrenic Anne (embarked on an erratic journey in TriBeCa) once Vicky has taken her place on the stage in The Treatment (1995) and who is, as it seems, eventually killed – a fate presumably shared by Clair, who, in Dealing with Clair (1988), walks alone by the road at night and also disappears mysteriously at the end of the play. In The City (2008), what do the ruins which another Clair discovers stand for, as she walks about the city that she says is in her head? In The Country (2000), where does the track that Corinne follows lead to, as she drives away from her house into the country? Finally, where is Bobby’s mother in Fewer Emergencies (2005), and where does her voice come from? In Crimp’s plays, the space where women stand – either physically or mentally but above all existentially – is an unsteady, complex and menacing territory. Wandering, vanishing shadows in search of an identity, a name, a way to inhabit the space of their lives, or a direction to give to their existences, women appear to be oscillating at a crossroads between confined or isolated physical spaces (in a studio flat, on a deserted road, or in a ghost city; locked in a room, tied to a chair, or put in bags) and abstract mental spaces constructed through and within language to fill in a threatening absence, or “lack of character”. In Crimpland, such shifting spaces seem to be used as cryptic metaphors to explore urgent issues about the status of women in contemporary Western society. They draw elusive landscapes or mindscapes pervaded by the neurotic, traumatic and sacrificial dynamics that affect the feminine at the beginning of the 21st century, and whose forms and causes are reflected upon and investigated.