Attempts on Her Life

Product Information

Fortuitously, we had ten actors, and there are ten different people leaving messages, Giving each actor one message, we tried a couple of improvisations. First each actor was to respond as though the message was left for them, and second they were to act as the character who leaves the message. The results were compelling and varied, but each emerging character seemed to contribute to a coherent sense of who Anne was and what has happened to her. This mysterious, unseen woman became someone who has gone missing after getting involved in all manner of dangerous or immoral activities, including prostitution, terrorism, fencing stolen goods, but also a woman who started out with philanthropic intent.

The script for Martin Crimp ’ s 1997 drama Attempts On Her Life looks more like an experimental novel than a play. There are no specified characters, but only a dash in the dialogue to indicate a change of speaker, and a few sparse stage directions dotted throughout. The rest is left up to the director — Archie Thomson in this case, for the ‘Sunscreen’ production at the Burton Taylor Studio. Crimp once said in a 2007 interview with the Socialist Review that “ I want it to be different every time. I want it to mutate, to respond. All plays do that to a certain extent but I wanted to set that as a stamp on this play. ” In a very postmodern fashion, Crimp takes the notion of the playwright, and destroys it, enacting his very own Barthesian ‘death of the author’.Not just in terms of aesthetics, but also thematically. The media is a central presence in the play, and therefore our conspicuous cameras and projectors as well as what they produce are directly related to the ideas in the text. There is a point to what is being said on the stage by having these things. If they were irrelevant, they wouldn't be there. Director Nathan Chapman's cast aren't always successful in their handling of the complex dialogue. Jeff Bone and Hadleigh Harrison's first scene suffered from an overabundance of pace to the detriment of clarity, but both of these actors later got the measure of the dialogue; some voices - a critically important piece of this show - were drowned out by music. The term "director" for this production must be used loosely. In fact I feel fraudulent in adopting this title, as this project has been, and was always intended to be, a highly collaborative one, in which the divisions between actors, director, crew and designers are blurred by everyone having responsibility for making the creative and interpretative decisions about the performance. This clash reached its peak towards the end of the play, in the scene in which Maddy Walker played a pretentious European art critic. While the scene was funny in its ruthless satire, behind the comedy lay a sinister idea. The artwork in the scene was about ‘ attempts on her life, ’ but the nature of these attempts remained ambiguous, with Crimp seeming to gesture towards the possibilities of suicide, murder, torture and so on, without ever laying his cards on the table. What was most disconcerting, and what made the production so powerful, was the sense in which all of the horrific events in the play became pieces of performance art, indistinguishable from one another. Similarly, the wide variety of interpretations which the play offers only intensifies the discomfort, and this production managed to leave these interpretive strands wide open. Crimp seems to suggest that these ‘ attempts on her life ’ could be genuine torture scenarios in a dystopian nightmare. Or they could mean absolutely nothing at all — and that is what is most frightening. Thomson and his actors balanced the comic with the deeply sinister, in what was a stunning production of an immensely powerful play. On the way out of Attempts on Her Life I overheard a student discussing the production. “I’m sure they missed out the scene with the answering machines,” she said. “I love that scene!” Ten years on, and even Martin Crimp’s ultra-contemporary, postmodern piece has become a classic to the extent that devotees grieve when the text is changed.

He went on to write a novel, 'Still Early Days', and 'An Anatomy', a collection of short stories. He entered a competition for local writers in 1981 run by the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. He won the competition with his play 'Living Remains' and the Orange Tree Theatre went on to stage many of his early pieces, including a number of translations of European plays. So what we have, with 'Attempts on Her Life', is a number of attempts to define an individual, Anne, by people who have never known her, yet have a lot of information about her. Our production, whether by accident or design, extends this concept, and what we see is the construction of an identity for public consumption. The main perpetrators in our version would seem to be the pair of film executives pitching their ideas to each other in the second scene, yet their lead is followed by all manner of agencies engaged with piecing together what information they have. And where things don't fit, or they contradict each other, these agencies embellish with details that suit their own agendas. In a bizarre case of art mirroring art, the process you will see the characters engaging in tonight is exactly the same process that our ensemble has gone through over the last three or four months. If, during the course of the performance, you find yourself forming opinions, reaching conclusions about who Anne is only to be forced into re-evaluating these decisions a few minutes later as new details come to light, that is exactly what we have done at every rehearsal.As it is, this Royal Court regular is well served in London by Tim Albery (director of the Metropolitan Opera’s recent “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the playwright’s partner in deconstructionist crime, and by a set from Gideon Davey that makes full, often eerie use of the Theater Upstairs’ two stage spaces. It’s not every writer who would pose much of his play in the form of a question, almost as if the language itself were interrogating the listener. But then it’s not every director who could ensure that the queries count — or, put another way, that a play about an elusive central character doesn’t elude us.

Finally, 'Attempts on Her Life' is a very modern play, and the use of these elements gives our production a similarly modern feel. I believe that we have been true to the spirit of Crimp's play, and have acquired new skills, explored further possibilities in the process. Does what we have done here reinforce the positives that new technology can bring to the theatre? Or does this technology simply get in the way? Ultimately, that is for you, the audience to decide, and I would be delighted if these decisions provoke the same diversity of views that 'Attempts on her Life' as a play seems to encourage. Neil Kendall is impressive in his scenes - particularly the brilliant scene comparing Anne to a car - and Callum West's contributions showed flashes of real skill. Zoë Chapman stood out among the women. It's good to see theatre like this being presented locally and the Bench's opening night audience was a fair size. This is theatre for the thinking man or woman. Enjoy. The play continues its run until Saturday. Though the drama was challenging to navigate as an audience member, that is not to say that it ever seemed self-indulgent or pointlessly obscure. There were moments where Crimp ’ s surrealist visions emerged as social commentary: one scene involved Bilton and Higgins playing a pair of glazed-eyed, slimy salespeople tasked with selling a new car, ‘ The Annie. ’ If turning the unseen ‘ Annie ’ into a car were not sinister enough, the superficiality of the advert — undoubtedly a comment on capitalism — gradually mutated into a proclamation of the merits of an Arian state. The zombie-like stares and lobotomised smiles created one of the funniest yet most deeply disturbing scenes of the play. In the recent National Theatre revival, Martin Crimp allowed Katie Mitchell to cut Scene 1, All Messages Deleted, and the text now permits this edit in all productions. But it seemed to me that the answer-phone messages in this scene serve as an introduction to the rest of the play. Phrases that we hear in this episode recur throughout the play, and I felt it was a useful way in to the play. The messages introduced us to a number of characters we were yet to meet, and so I opted not only to retain this scene, but to use it as the spring board for developing our production. You have to hand it to Anne Tipton. This year's winner of the James Menzies-Kitchin Memorial Trust Award, the prize for promising young directors, has got courage. Martin Crimp's coolly European meditation in 17 scenes on a woman, also called Anne - who may be a terrorist on the run, or an artist who has turned her suicide attempts into her art, or a traveller who has her photo taken by millionaires' swimming pools and in slums, or a woman whose children have been slaughtered in civil war, or even a child herself - is not an easy text for any director. And particularly not for one right at the start of her career and without lots of resources.

Review by Georgia Renwick for markaspen.wordpress.com (June 2017)

He has been writer-in-residence for both theatre and television, including at Thames Television, the New Dramatists (New York) and the Royal Court Theatre in London and has adapted his own work for radio. He has won the Radio Times Drama Award and the John Whiting Award.