Abstract In this age of post-dramaticity that does away with such definitional concepts as conflict or fiction on a mimetic stage, Martin Crimp relocates ‘drama’ (action, conflict) within language itself. The translator’s challenge consists in fleshing out the materiality of sound and in capturing the dramaticity of the form as it is reinvented in musicality and in the underground activity of an often gendered lexis. Lacan’s concept of ‘moterialism’ as well as Roland Barthes’s ‘signifiance’ of language will be helpful concepts both for a theoretical investigation and for addressing the practical translation challenges. French director Marc Paquien’s metaphorical use of Chaillot’s monumental staircase and Hubert Colas’s expressionistic white balloons in their productions of Fewer Emergencies will help us visualize what is at stake in Crimp’s language and confirm the impression of contained semantic plenitude I could sense and analyse both as Crimp’s translator and as an academic.