Attempts on Her Life

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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. Why? Amateur companies tend to have much shorter runs, in smaller spaces and with much less time in which to construct and road-test elaborate sets, making physical construction very ineffective in terms of time and cost. But film lends almost infinite flexibility to a production. The audience can be transported to the four corners of the globe in an instant through the projection of simple, recognisable images. The visible space can be distorted, meaning entirely separate locations can concurrently occupy the same space as the performers, and the apparent limitations of what can take place in real time on stage are removed with the careful use of pre-recorded and edited footage. And all of these things are extremely portable, particularly in this digital age. 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. 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. I didn't want the actors to be restricted by these newly discovered characters at the expense of other ideas, so we didn't refer directly to these initial exercises when working on the text. Rather the focus was on identifying a solid, workable context for each scene. The media pervades the entire play, and what emerged was a sense that each scene depicted some kind of outside agency creating, manipulating or responding to an image of Anne, thus we ended up with film executives, PR teams, photographers, journalists and audiences, and each context dictated the form of the scene. We have tried to vary each episode, really out of necessity, as it is impossible to reach a unified definition of Anne because the play is full of contradictory accounts. It seemed for a long time that our initial exploration was to have little influence on the finished product, but there were certain moments in rehearsal when, as if by magic, we found ourselves remembering those early characters and realising that they were consistent with the roles people were playing in various scenes. I loved these moments - they vindicated the exploratory process and made us realise that everything we have tried has had an influence on the shape of the play, even if only on a subconscious level.

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’. Attempts on Her Life' is theatrical event, and therefore the audience's experience must remain a theatrical one. It has been a key consideration that the projections should never be used to do what theatre can do perfectly well on its own. The function of film has been to focus the audience's attention to something specific on the stage, to add another dimension to the action, to support the live work of the actors and perhaps to subvert it at times, but never to replace it. 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. Applaud what he is doing or not (many may be reminded of the Woody Allen line about “achiev(ing) total heaviosity”), Crimp mines a recognizable vein, and one can imagine American directors like Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars desperate to get their hands on the text.So whilst 'Attempts on her Life' has been criticised in the past for being pretentious, cold soulless, it seems to me that at its core is a very fundamental idea - the elusive nature of human identity, the struggle to define an individual despite knowing it is impossible to do so. We all have moments where we question who we are and try to find answers in other people, and there is nothing more human that a play could explore than this quest to make sense of our own existence and place in this world. And it is, in some respects, dated. It first opened in March 1997. Tony Blair was on the verge of being elected; Princess Diana was still alive; the war in Bosnia loomed large. Mobile phones, iPods and blogs had yet to exert their full grip and the Twin Towers were still standing. Wisely, Katie Mitchell’s production doesn’t attempt to update it with new gadgetry, but pins it in its time, so that its restless, splintered, slippery shape gives voice to the obsessions of the dying millennium.

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. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

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

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. 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.