European Journal of English Studies

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Images of Woman in Martin Crimp’s Attempts On

Her Life

Heiner Zimmermann

To cite this article: Heiner Zimmermann (2003) Images of Woman in Martin Crimp’s Attempts On
Her Life, European Journal of English Studies, 7:1, 69-85, DOI: 10.1076/ejes.7.1.69.14827

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1076/ejes.7.1.69.14827

Published online: 09 Aug 2010.

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 European Journal of English Studies 1382-5577/03/0701-069$16.00
2003, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 69–85 ©Swets & Zeitlinger

Images of Woman in
Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life

Heiner Zimmermann
University of Heidelberg

Martin Crimp’s Theatre

For years it appeared as if Martin Crimp would remain the promising young
playwright. Only with the production of The Treatment, which won the John
Whiting Award in 1993, did he progress from the Theatre Upstairs to the
main stage of The Royal Court. The success of his adaptation of Molière’s
Misanthrope at the Young Vic in 1996 and the international acclaim won
by Attempts on her Life (1997) finally established his reputation as one of
the leading British dramatists and his collected plays were subsequently
published in the Faber Contemporary Classics series.1 He was born in
Kent and brought up in London and West Yorkshire, where he went to the
school Tom Stoppard had attended decades before him. He studied Eng-
lish at Cambridge University and became involved in student theatre. The
Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond prodded him into writing his first plays
and showed his early works, including Living Remains (1982), A Variety
of Death Defying Acts (1985), Dealing with Clair (1988) and Play with
Repeats (1989). At the same time, Crimp made a name for himself as the
author of radio plays. His Three Attempted Acts obtained the Giles Cooper
Award in 1985 and the triple bill Definitely the Bahamas (1986) received
the Radio Times Drama Award. From the nineties onwards his new work,
from No One Sees the Video (1990) and Getting Attention (1991) to his
latest play Face to the Wall (2002), was featured in the programmes of the
Royal Court. In the nineties Crimp became the most prominent translator

Correspondence: Heiner Zimmermann, Anglistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg,

Kettengasse 12, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany.
1 Martin Crimp, Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). Martin Crimp’s plays include:
Definitely the Bahamas. Manuscript, 1986; Dealing with Clair (London: Nick Hern
Books, 1988); Play with Repeats (London, Nick Hern Books, 1990); Getting Attention,
No One Sees the Video, Stage Kiss (London: Nick Hern Books, 1991); The Treatment
(London: Nick Hern, 1993); Attempts on Her Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1997); The
Country (London: Faber & Faber, 2000 ); Face to the Wall and Fewer Emergencies
(London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
70 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

of French drama for the English stage with adaptations of Ionesco’s The
Chairs (1997), Koltès’ Roberto Zucco (1997), Genet’s The Maids (1999)
and Marivaux’ The Triumph of Love for the Royal Shakespeare Company,
the Young Vic and the Théâtre de Complicite. Since the nineties his work
has acquired growing international fame and has been produced by leading
directors on the European Continent2 and in the United States.
Crimp is a conventional dramatist in the sense that his central concern is
with the text as artifact. His early work for radio sharpened his sensitivity
for the rhythm and music of the language. His meticulously crafted texts
are characterised by the repetition of words, phrases, ideas, and leitmotifs.
Their dense, elliptical composition explores the complexity and ambigu-
ity of language from irony and double entendre to the charging of words
by their context to slips of the tongue and simultaneous speaking. In an
interview concerning The Treatment he explained: ‘What art has to do to
life [is] to make a shape out of it’.3 From the early Definitely the Baha-
mas to his latest play The Country, language is for Crimp’s characters the
locus of the battle for the definition and assessment of reality and hence of
dominance. Their use of subtext, the weight of the information withheld,
provoke a feeling of menace and fear reminiscent of Pinter. Like the older
writer Crimp’s exposures show up the negative side of civilisation, the
rational being’s techniques for excluding, repressing and concealing the
inacceptable, the irrational.
Crimp’s plays combine social satire with Pinter’s comedy of menace and
occasionally even with the black comedy thriller. But even when they take
up a notorious court case, they investigate the fundamental human issues
underlying the topical concern. Thus his dramatisation of the estate agent
Suzy Lamplugh’s disappearance in Dealing with Clair peels off the glossy
veneer from the profiteering life-style of the neoliberal market economy
and exposes the moral perversion and emotional poverty beneath. 4
No One Sees the Video is a variation on the microphysics of power,
also a favourite subject of Pinter’s.5 Its theme is the creation of the con-
sumer subject6 through market research, which transforms individuals
2 Two remarkable productions were Katie Mitchell’s mise en scène of Attempts at the
Piccolo Teatro in Milan and the production of The Country by Luc Bondy in Zurich
and Berlin in Autumn 2001.
3 The New Statesman (21 March1997).
4 See also Andrew Stephen, The Suzy Lamplugh Story (Faber: London, 1988).
5 For instance in ‘The Examination’, ‘The Applicant’, The Birthday Party, The Hot-
house.
6 I use the term ‘subject’ in the Foucauldian sense of being subjected to the norms of
society. In Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) he explained that examination
and confession are the basic ‘dispositifs’ of power and showed the close relationship
between power and knowledge as well as its productivity.
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 71

into objects of video-monitored interrogations. Their confessions about

their behaviour and their desires as customers allow their interviewers to
classify and categorize them according to certain norms and to transform
them into computer statistics. The interviewees’ reluctance to be videoed
and thus made available as objects for voyeuristic purposes or control is
weaker than their narcissistic desire to see their image on the screen. The
interviewers’ professional methods in questioning and categorizing, their
formation of an image of others in order to make them manipulable spill
over into their private lives and corrupt their personal relationships. This
blurs the distinction between reality and its simulacra. The protagonist
Liz’ transformation from a sceptical interviewee into an experienced inter-
viewer illustrates the reversibility of the roles in this power system.7 The
object of market research, however, turns out to be a void; for it explores
desire, that is absence. The investigations cannot live up to the ideological
promise of dispelling the customers’ feeling of emptiness (p. 87). What
they create is not meaning, but a kind of knowledge geared to promoting
production.
On the surface, The Treatment,8 Crimp’s third theatrical scrutiny of
central aspects of neoliberal market society, is a satire on the film business
located in a stereotyped image of New York as the capital of a mercenary
society.9 On closer inspection, it turns out to be a meta-drama comment-
ing on the relationship between art and life. Metaphorical scenic images
convey the themes of the play. The protagonist, Anne, is bound and gagged
by her hooded husband in order to silence her whilst he harangues her on
the beauties of the world. He rejects, however, all art as the investigation
of the repressed unconscious, the inadmissible qualities of human nature.
Anne’s domestic torturer also warns her not to be corrupted by the film
producers she turns to in order to earn her living by selling the story of her
life. For a moment only it seems as if Anne may have recovered her voice
and her self-determination. But her promoters’ attempt to reveal her hidden
truths soon makes her the object of a power game. The transformation of
her life story in order to heighten its marketability implies its appropriation
by the professionals.10 Anne is gradually silenced and expropriated as the

7 Foucault pointed out the reversibility of all power systems.

8 Michael Billington was convinced that with this play Crimp made the ‘leap from genu-
ine promise to rich fulfilment’, Guardian (22 April 1993).
9 In 1991 Crimp was sent to New York for three months by the Royal Court on a writers’
exchange programme.
10 See Elisabeth Angel-Perez’ analysis of the facilitators’ taking possession of Anne’s
discourse through repetition and variation in ‘Martin Crimp. The Treatment (1993)
et Attempts on her Life (1997): tricotage du texte et auto-engendrement’, Ecritures
Contemporaines 5 (2002) pp. 99–110.
72 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

author of her own past and as the principal actress in the film version of it.
Her personal truth no longer has any importance. A scriptwriter charges
the banality of Anne’s life story with sexual sensationalism. One of the
producers explains that in the process of transformation by which life
becomes art, ‘truth must be laid on a Procrustean bed and cut here and there
until it fits’ (p. 80). What counts is audience expectation and a concept
of probability determined by the habits of reception. The Treatment like
Attempts on her life shows the process of fabricating a scenario. The real
Anne does not conform with the film makers’ idea of the character in her
story.11 In the power struggle set in motion by the production of the film,
she and the dramatist/scriptwriter Clifford are excluded from the project,
as are the couple who initiated it. Lead actor John, the sponsor and crowd
puller, takes over the project. The former secretary assumes Anne’s role in
the film and according to her partner ‘does not “play” Anne, she is Anne.
She inhabits Anne. At certain moments she is more Anne than herself’ (p.
80).
As it is impossible for Anne to make a clear distinction between her
life and the artifact made out of it, the loss of her (hi)story means for her
a loss of reality, a loss of identity. Her metamorphosis into an elegant
young lady is accompanied by psychic suffering. When she realizes that
her sexual encounter with one of her promoters was staged for the voyeur-
ist scriptwriter to put more spice into the film project, she loses control.
In the tangle of life and art she has recourse to art for her revenge. Like
Regan and Cornwall in King Lear she and her husband gouge out the eyes
of the dramatist who gazed on what he should not have seen.
During the celebration marking the success of the film about her life
Anne is conspicuous by her absence. Her story has once more turned into
reality. She has returned to her domestic hell, away from the loss and com-
modification of her self and her life in the service of film-making. She has
interiorised her subjection to her fascist husband and can no longer cope
with freedom. She wants to be told what to do and does not recognise
herself as a victim. Her loss of identity and sense of guilt have destroyed
her mind. A final desperate attempt to escape leads to her melodramatic
accidental death.
Blindness is the central metaphor in the surrealist scenes that frame
the play. In the first act, Anne is the fare of a blind taxi driver, who has

11 The motif reminded numerous reviewers of John Guare’s play, Six Degrees of Separa-
tion. Sam Shepard satirised Hollywood showbiz in Angel City and David Mamet in
Speed the Plough. Crimp himself referred to the painter in Patrick White’s The Vivisec-
tor.
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 73

to be told where he is and does not know where he is going. The scene is
repeated at the end of the play with the blinded playwright as passenger.
This theatrical visualisation of our ignorance concerning the unconscious
forces that determine desire and fuel our creative urge intrigued even those
London theatre critics who habitually swear by true-to-life realism.
Anne’s experience not only exposes the fact that art preys on life or, as
Crimp himself put it: ‘Art is an egotistical activity. It cannot see beyond
itself’.12 Dramatist Clifford’s story of a voyeurist painter and a conniving
couple underpins the interdependence of voyeurism and exhibitionism in
the relationship between Anne and the film makers. It reveals the extent
to which art is the product of a form of voyeurism that trades on the exhi-
bitionism of its subjects. In an interview, Crimp identified himself with
Anne, pointing out that ‘the play came out of my experiences as a writer
and feeling marginalised and put upon’.13 The fact that he was referring to
his dependence on his ‘paymasters’14 and the dramatist’s expropriation by
the director is confirmed by the exclusion not only of Anne but also of the
dramatist/scriptwriter by the actor and financier in the play.
In his speech during the celebration at the end of the drama, it is the
film actor who contradicts postmodern scepticism about the power of art
to change reality: ‘What I say to you is that art changes everything – It is
the enduring reflection of our transient selves. It is what makes us real’ (p.
82). The idea that reality can only be conceived thanks to the existence of
art as its opposite presupposes, however, a clear distinction between both.
Anne’s story shows, however, that it cannot always be drawn. On the con-
trary, the swamping of the postmodern subject by the mediated perception
of reality has created a sense of loss and generated a desire for authentic
life experience that does not stop short of art itself. From performance art
to reality TV the boundaries between the two are blurred. Crimp’s reflec-
tion on the growing importance of performance art in the theatre of the
last decade and the way it has superseded traditional drama is the subject
of his next play.

Attempts on her Life, a postdramatic play

The reasons for the erosion of the traditional model of drama in postmod-
ern theatre lie not only in a changed understanding of the subject and of
history but also in the altered relationship between reality and art. Since
the beginnings of modernism, the theatre has been increasingly supplanted

12 ‘Writer’s Crimp’, interview with John O’Mahony, The Guardian (20.04.1993).

13 ‘Writer’s Crimp’, The Guardian (20 April 1993).
14 Rick Jones quoting Crimp in ‘Scriptwriters from Hell’, Time Out (14–21 April 1993).
74 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

Fig. 1. Martin Crimp, Attemps on her Life,

Schauspiel Hannover, Niedersäch-
sisches Staatstheater. Director: Ste-
fan Otteni, Premiere 24th September
1998. Photo: Caroline Otteni.

in its representational function by

film and television, just as painting
has been by photography. Similar to
the substitution of the picture in the
visual arts by collages of objects and
materials, by installations and envi-
ronments, the theatre has invented
new forms of performance no longer
based on the mimesis of reality but
located in the interface between
theatre and collage, performance and
installation art. The development of
composition structures similar to
those of the visual arts has been complemented by the adaptation of for-
mal strategies borrowed from film and TV, which in their turn have done
much to change the mode of viewing stage performances.

Speakers not characters

As in plays by Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Elfriede Jelinek or Heiner
Müller, Martin Crimp’s Attempts has no dramatis personae. The creation
of traditional dramatic characters would jar with postmodern philosophy’s
rejection of the idea of the subject’s essentialist identity with him/herself
and the impossibility of his/her representation. Also, the elimination of the
dramatic character is a radical, final step on the road towards anti-illusion-
ary epic drama, a development initiated by Brecht and marking the end of
the imitation of reality on the stage.
The reader of Crimp’s text no longer encounters the habitual image
of passages of dialogue headed by the names of their protagonists, but
‘expanses of speech’ (Elfriede Jelinek, ‘Sprachflächen’), which make no
distinction between narration, dialogue, description, expository text and
stage direction. The postdramatic play is performed by a group of anony-
mous speakers who do not impersonate characters. Their number is not
determined by the author. In different productions of Attempts it has varied
between five and eight. The text is not assigned to definite speakers. Only
the limits of the units to be spoken by the same actor are marked, as are
the frequent overlappings of speech. The performance is characterized by a
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 75

fundamental split between the speaker, who is only a mouthpiece, and what
is spoken. Crimp, however, describes Attempts on the flyleaf as ‘a piece
for a company of actors whose composition should reflect the composition
of the world beyond the theatre’. The spectators of Crimp’s play are thus
presented with narratives on its central character, with images of Anne that
refer to her absence while trying to render her present.

What the audience imagine and what they see

In contrast to dramatic theatre, the performance of Crimp’s play is not sub-
ordinate to its text, which contains virtually no stage directions. What the
spectators see is not the translation of what they hear into body language
and stage scenery. The action on the stage is not part and parcel of the frag-
ments of dialogue or the stories about the absent protagonist, Anne, which
are recited by the speakers. Martin Crimp leaves the mise en scène to the
stage director’s discretion. He does, however, reject a minimalist style of
production. Instead he suggests, ‘Let each scenario in words – the dialogue
– unfold a distinct world – a design – which best exposes its irony’.
This was indeed observed by the first production at the Royal Court, as
can be gathered from its review in the Sunday Times (23rd March 1997),
which commented on the relationship between the speakers’ words and the
stage action: ‘What they say is parodied, contradicted or subverted by their
own actions and by filmed images’. Tim Albery’s ‘high-tech’ staging with
Gideon Davey as designer, sometimes echoed the performance style of the
Wooster Group. Its shifting locations suggested an airport runway with a
suspended screen showing x-rayed luggage revolving on a carousel, an
airplane, and a conference lounge, a restaurant table and a TV studio; there
TV movies and interviews were produced about Anne and with her. TV
films, videos and slides projected her images onto screens. Messages were
addressed to her on an answer phone. Subtitles and translators rendered
texts from foreign languages into English. Installations and comments by
art critics evoked her memory.
In Munich, the play was produced as a TV talk show, a virtuoso speech
opera with pop and disco insets. The stage set recalled the banked rows
of seats in an auditorium. The Hannover production located the play in an
anatomy theatre or theatre laboratory, where the actors recited their texts
at clinically white tables as in a spoken oratorio. In Hamburg, the text was
acted by a group of film script authors in a TV studio with light projectors,
cameras, monitor screens, show platforms and presenters.
The absence of fictional characters makes the stage a place of narration.
Crimp’s exhibition of the act of narration goes far beyond Brecht. The
speakers are not defined by what they say, nor are they to be identified with
76 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

it. What the spectators hear is only rarely dialogue. Instead of witnessing
a conflict, they hear the recital of texts and see ‘autonomous’ stage action
which provides an ironic counterpoint to them. The play is a ‘polylogue’
of consensus. Interjections, comments, self-corrections and alternative
versions frequently suggest, however, that the text is being invented on
the spot by its speakers. This also emphasizes its provisional character. It
drifts imperceptibly between different modes of speech. The illusion of a
closed system of communication on the stage is shunned. Most of the time
the audience is addressed directly.
The juxtaposition of the spoken text and the performance on stage sets
images of a different nature in opposition to one another. Pictures in the
mind evoked by verbal imagery compete both with the physical images of
the speakers’ actions on stage and with the virtual images of reality pro-
jected on film and TV screens. With its attention simultaneously solicited
by different media, the audience’s gaze wanders between heterogeneous
sign systems and discourses. The plethora of visual impressions and their
diffuse character make it impossible for the overtaxed spectator to focus on
the spectacle. The performance thus reflects the mediatised experience of
postmodern reality and the impression of chaos created by it. Aleks Sierz
therefore saw the play as a recipe for creating a new kind of theatre.15

The play as a picture and the space-time of collage

With the postmodern fragmentation of the dramatic action and the relin-
quishment of causality, the collage, which in the visual arts takes its origin
in the Futurist movement and Dadaism, has become one of the preferred
principles of organisation in many other genres of art as well. In Attempts,
dramatic action as mise en scène of a story is only a reminiscence, dis-
missed as antiquated by one of the art critics in scenario 11 who refers to
‘the outmoded conventions of dialogue and so-called characters lumber-
ing towards the embarrassing dénouements of the theatre’ (p. 50). Like a
Cubist montage, which juxtaposes fragments of heterogeneous objects and
materials, the play assembles scraps of disparate linguistic materials and
‘objects’, ranging from recordings on an answering machine, rap songs,
film scenarios to commercials, the proceedings of a trial and art criticism.
It switches back and forth from description to dialogue, from narrative
to expository text, from verse to prose. These fragments evoke different
ways of simulating reality in different media. Like a collage in art, the
play highlights the material of these fragments, i.e., language, through the

15 Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber,
2001), p. 33.
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 77

use of ready-mades, such as the safety instructions for airline passengers

or the cliché of price announcements in supermarkets and objets trouvés16
such as a commercial for a new car. As in visual art the material trans-
ports the meaning. It bears the trace of the authentic which distinguishes
it from representation, it is a witness of the ‘real’ world.17 Insets of poésie
concrète, such as the catalogue of unconnected words recited in scenario
11, are reminiscent of abstract painting. The foreign text of the advert in
scenario 7 and the translation of the comment on young Anne in scenario
16 confront the audience with languages they do not understand. These sig-
nifiers do not evoke any meaning for the spectators. They are only words,
sound material. A similar effect is caused by the frequent overlapping of
speeches, which blurs the meaning of what is being said. Even when pas-
sages do refer to ‘reality’, they lack a context to instil meaning into them.
As the play does not tell a story, as its composition does not obey the
principle of cause and effect and evokes no dimension of time these pas-
sages remain self-referential. Instead, the montage structure is informed
by abstract, geometrical principles of composition such as verbal echoes,
repetition and variation, similarity and contrast. The titles of the scenarios
are repeated at their ends, thus giving them an appearance of closure. The
messages on the answering machine in the first scene introduce many of
the play’s central themes and motifs. Messsage 9 for instance, is reiterated
verbatim in scenario 11, where it becomes part of a critique of Anne’s
installation. Her decision as a young girl to become a terrorist (p. 25) is
taken up in scenario 9, which describes her as a full-blown professional. In
scenarios 1, 6, 11, and 17 her suicide attempts are discussed in the light of
psychology and assessed as art. Scenarios 5 and 14 are chorus-like insets
of rap songs commenting on the play’s protagonist.

What do we see? Reality or its double?

Crimp’s postdramatic play is made up not of scenes but scenarios. Its mod-
els are not drama, but film, performance and installation art. As one of the
art critics in scenario 11 points out, ‘It’s theatre … for a world in which
theatre itself has died’ (p. 50). It relates to reality through the parody of
film-making. Descriptive passages do not depict what the narrator imag-
ines, but what the camera sees, ‘[the] panorama of the whole valley’ (p. 15)

16 A well-known example is Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered tea-cup, ‘Objet’ (Le Déjeu-

ner en fourrure) 1935/36. Here the artist reshapes the industrial object and thus alien-
ates it from its original form and function.
17 Monika Wagner, ‘Introduction’, in Das Material der Kunst (München: C.H. Beck,
2001).
78 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

or scenes such as Anne ‘driving away from a bombed-out city in a metallic

red Cadillac circa 1956’ (p. 53).
The imaginary films cater to the spectators’ voyeuristic needs by giv-
ing them the impression of participating in reality, ‘We need to feel/What
we’re seeing is real’ (p. 19). For it is now television that provides the ‘true’
reality, or as Baudrillard put it, ‘The real is not only what can be repro-
duced, but that which is already always reproduced: The hyperreal’.18 In
line with Berkeley’s esse est percipi, only the eye of the camera can make
us become ‘real’ by making us visible.
But in fact the script-writers do try out the plausibility of different ver-
sions of reality and also speculate about audience reactions. ‘Memories’
of Anne are corrected while they are being recounted. Even photographs
are not reliable. Anne’s mother fails to recognize her daughter in the pic-
ture she has sent her. Moreover, when looked at close up, the realism of
photographic and electronic images dissolves into dots and pixels. The
circumstantial evidence of the documents, testimonials and objects is not
only fragmentary but also irremediably contradictory and unreliable.
The term ‘scenario’, however, also refers to the mise en scène of
everyday life according to the script designed by the subject. Reality is
contaminated by simulacra. In the protagonist’s suicide attempt it is impos-
sible to distinguish between mise en scène and reality. It is staged by her
as a performance, but her previous flirtations with death and her relatives’
reactions also define it as ‘real’. The anxiety and uncertainty caused by this
ambiguity is expressed by one of her friends’ questions on the answering
machine: ‘Is that the scenario I’m supposed to imagine? The scenario of a
dead body rotting next to the machine?’ (p. 3). As the rap song in scenario
5 points out, the actor’s representation of Hecuba’s mourning in Hamlet
far surpasses the Danish prince’s expression of his ‘real’ grief.
Every speech in the play is fiction. But that which is not ‘real’ still
exists. The collage of parodies of very different genres of text and dis-
course amounts to an ironic comment on mimetic processes and the media-
tion by which the image of reality is constructed. It does not represent
reality, it is the mimesis of mimesis. Its concern is mimesis itself.19
The presence of absence: seeing images
Martin Crimp’s play is an attempt at biographical fiction for the stage in
the age of its very impossibility. Its 17 ‘scenarios for the theatre’ bear on
18 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulations’, trans. Paul Beitchman, in Patricia Waugh, Postmod-
ernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 186.
19 Manfred Pfister, ‘Meta-Theater und Materialität. Zu Robert Wilsons ‘The CIVIL
warS’, in Materialität der Kommunikation, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und K. Lud-
wig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 457–465.
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 79

the life and identity of a woman called Anne. However, since the discovery
of the unconscious and the disintegration of the concept of history as conti-
nuity, identity as the familiarity of the continuous subject with him/herself
has become a chimera. The original subject cannot be represented. His-
torical reality cannot be retrieved. Anne, whose suicide may be the cause
of the enquiry into her life, never appears on the stage. The play’s centre
is an absence. The protagonist’s bodily presence is replaced by a mise en
scène of images, descriptions and traces as in an installation.20 The speak-
ers evoke reflections of Anne in various media such as photographs, vid-
eos, film scripts, recordings on an answering machine, a commercial, trial
proceedings, her suicide notes and personal objects such as her medicine
bottles or her ashtray – in short an archive of the absent central character.
The testimonials also include a conventional biographical sketch exploring
her origins and her family, describing the landscape in which she grew up
and reporting on her parents’ memories of her childhood, her professional
life and her travels. All these traces of her existence are fragments that
contribute to the memorial reconstruction of Anne and her life.
Like Julian Barnes’ novel Flaubert’s Parrot or A.S. Byatt’s The Bio-
grapher’s Tale, Crimp’s play exhibits the various sources and methods
of biographical archeology showing that the portrait is determined by its
medium, that biography is made up of constructions and interpretations.
Drawing a border line between historical fact and fiction is impossible. The
original, historical truth is unattainable. In most of the scenarios, the absent
protagonist is called Anne. But she is also given the names Annie, Anya,
Ann, Anny and Annushka. She is in turn said to be 40, and 18 or 19 years
old, to be a mother and a single woman. She is described as the heroine of a
film scenario, a suicidal performance artist, a terrorist, a typical consumer,
the official of a humanitarian organisation, a physicist, a tourist guide, the
victim of a civil war, ‘a pornographic movie star/ A killer and a brand of
car’ (p. 59).
The different sketches, in fact, portray completely different women and
even identify Anne with objects. This cannot be explained away by refer-
ring to the different social roles played by Anne in different situations or
the radical changes of identity she has undergone in the course of her life.
The speakers in scenario 9 vainly attempt to trace the roots of the adult
terrorist in the child who prayed to God to bless, ‘Mummy, Daddy and
Wiggy, the cat’ (p. 37). Nor can these contradictions be explained away
20 One of the two signs constituting a stage character, the name and the body, is lacking.
Hans Belting observes in Der zweite Blick (München: W. Fink, 2000), p. x, that the
image was created by the gap left by the dead. It provided the dead with a medium in
which they could encounter the living and be remembered by them.
80 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

by the observation that, as a megastar, Anne assumes many different roles

and thus becomes an emblem of the postmodern condition of the self, that
like Jim Morrison or Madonna she personifies the dialectics of being dif-
ferent and being the same, of being absent as a subject and yet present as
an object through her representations in the media, of being the subject
and the object of these – endlessly performing the vanishing act of the
postmodern subject.
Anne herself provides the puzzled spectator with clues that might
impose some coherence on the wilderness of contradictions. A speaker
in scenario 6 points out Anne’s own descriptions of her state of mind, her
impression that ‘she is not a real character, not a real character like you get
in a book or on TV, but a lack of character, an absence … of character.’(p.
25). Even as a child she is reported to have confessed to her Mum and Dad
that she feels, ‘like a TV screen … where everything in front looks real
and alive, but round the back there’s just dust and a few wires’ (p. 24).
Little Anne seems to feel what Jaques Lacan discussed in his analysis of
the gaze. For the viewing other she is only an image.21 Between her and
the onlooker there is a screen onto which her image is projected. It is the
product of the viewer’s gaze and of the look she returns. The onlooker’s
gaze does not penetrate the surface of the ‘screen’. It never reaches the real
person behind it, but merely captures her image. That image, however, is
just a coloured surface, not skin covering flesh and blood.
The ‘megastar’ Anne lives for her image and on her image, and that
image is informed by the rhetoric of advertising and protected by the
trademark sign, the manifestation of her self-creation. Her images are the
models of consumer society, which desires her wealth, fame and independ-
ence. They belong to a sphere of simulation produced by the media which
is superimposed on everyday life. PR photos show her rubbing shoulders
alternately with the rich and the poor from all over the globe. As a global
terrorist, Anne sells her image to Vogue and her story to Hollywood. With
the aid of video recordings she even stages her suicide attempt as a per-
formance and sells it to the art market. When the rap song in scenario 14
repeats that, ‘She’s the girl next door/ She’s the fatal flaw/ She’s the reason
for/ The Trojan War’ (p. 59) it becomes clear that like Helen of Troy Anne
is the plane of projection for the multi-faceted myth of woman in contem-
porary society. She is mother, femme fatale, lesbian, artist, revolutionary,
scholar, lover, victim, star, consumer, object of male desire and commod-

21 Gunter Gebauer, ‘Bilderbereitschaft und Bildverweigerung’, in Der zweite Blick, ed.

H. Belting, pp. 55–66; Jaques Lacan, ‘Was ist ein Bild/Tableau ?’ and ‘Linie und
Licht’, in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. Gottlieb Boehm (München: W. Fink, 1994), pp. 75–89;
60–74.
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 81

ity. She literally becomes a vehicle. As the image of today’s emancipated

woman, she also takes on roles formerly reserved for men. She is a gallery
of mirrors in which the play satirically reflects the multitude of contradic-
tory images of postmodern woman. It is her physical absence which keeps
her name a cipher open to a host of different meanings.

The male gaze

In spite of feminist efforts, the images of women produced by the media
of global consumerism predominantly reflect the male perspective. The
voyeurist male gaze transforms woman into a passive object put there to
be seen, a body, a commodity, a fetish. Scenario 7 entitled ‘The new Anny’
does not show a ‘new woman’, the ironic commercial identifies Anne with
a new brand of car. The procedure is emblematic of the instrumentalisation
of the female body and female sexuality in advertising. The personification
of a commodity as a woman in order to eroticise it for the gaze of the male
customer reifies woman and reduces her to commodity status. The clichés
of the male perspective are again exposed in scenario 12, when Anne, who
flees with her daughter’s dead body from a city ravaged by civil war, is
confronted with a militia patrol. The foul-mouthed ‘woman with the long
grey hair and nastily pock-marked face’ does not fail to provoke male
sexist frustration: ‘Why can’t she be more attractive?’ (p. 55). In a film
scenario entitled, ‘The tragedy of love and ideology’, a young woman’s
revolt against her reduction to a passive object is ironically shown from a
condescending male perspective as naïve and hopeless. In a parody of TV
melodrama Anne identifies with the lost cause of socialism’s rearguard
skirmishes against omnipotent global capitalism. The pseudo-conflict does
not even touch the male-dominated power system, which is far beyond the
revolutionary heroine’s reach. Her socialist commitment only exposes her
juvenile romanticism. Her childish revolt takes place in a highly bourgeois
environment. It culminates with her drumming helplessly with her frail
fists on her irresistible lover’s mighty chest, which turns into a scene of
sexual intercourse with her on top. This leaves no doubt about where her
strength lies.

Disrupting the male perspective: Live Art

Attempts equally ironically addresses Live Art and in particular feminist
Body Art. The controversy on contemporary art between a modish and
a reactionary critic in the middle of the text also provides a critique of
the play. It focuses on Anne’s mise en scène of her suicide attempt as
an installation. She exhibits video recordings of her body menaced and
transformed by suicide attempts together with medicine bottles, pieces of
82 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

broken glass, suicide notes, records of hospital admissions and polaroids

of HIV-positive men with whom she has had unprotected intercourse. The
progressive critic appraises this as if it were just an ordinary installation,
‘She is offering us no less than the spectacle of her own existence, the radi-
cal pornography – if I may use that overused word – of her own broken
and abused almost Christ-like - body’ (p. 50).
Like television, which obliterates the difference between the simu-
lacrum and the real, Anne’s ritual performance erases the border between
life and art.22 Like the play, the installation secures traces of her existence
and her suicide attempt. Personal objects and their materiality suggest
authenticity and ‘real-ness’.23 They bear meaning related to her person,
evoking her memory. This has little in common with Crimp’s ironical
constructions of images of Anne through language, his parody of dis-
courses and genres and the social criticism they imply. Rather his collage
of scenarios constitutes a theatre in search of an elusive, absent reality, a
theatre that ironically refers to other texts and media and that clearly bears
the stamp of ‘work’. For Crimp, ‘the text is what’s important to respect
– that’s what makes a play.’24 He relies on the imaginative power of the
word and critically questions the increasing influence of performance art
on the theatre, although he, however, uses performance techniques himself.
Attempts, unlike performance art, never crosses the border into reality, nor
does it represent reality. As we have seen, its fragments of text, construct
fictional versions of reality in different media, viewed from an ironical
distance. The only parallel between the play and Anne’s installation is that,
in her performance too, the real presence of her body is replaced by a video
recording. The performative character of her suicide ritual is transformed
into a media-simulation. Thus, the play of presence and absence is mir-
rored.
The focus on Performance Art, nevertheless, brings the female body
into the centre of the play, from which it has been conspicuously absent so
far. In the 70s and 80s feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Ann
Magnuson, or Joan Jonas25 reclaimed the body in their performances as
subject, since in numberless portraits of nude women by male artists it had

22 A phenomenon that Crimp explored in his previous play, The Treatment.

23 Wagner, Das Material der Kunst, pp. 57–107.
24 Interview with John Whitley, ‘The Enigma that is Mr. Crimp’, Telegraph (11 May
2000).
25 For details see Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London:
Routledge, 1997); Edith Almhofer, Performance Art. Die Kunst zu leben (Wien: Her-
mann Böhlaus, 1986); RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since 1960 (New
York: H.N. Abrams, 1998).
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 83

been transformed into an object.26 They wanted to disrupt the social cli-
ché opposing active/male to passive/female and defining women as mute
objects there to be seen and denying them the role of a subject that sees
and speaks.27 By making the naked female body the stage, the material on
which they worked, these artists exposed it in order to assume control of
their own image, to assert their sexuality and pleasure. Like Duchamp’s
objet trouvé it is no aesthetic object in the traditional sense, but a provoca-
tion designed to change our way of seeing reality. The body artist’s per-
formance returns the audience’s gaze and transforms the spectator into an
actor who is seen.
In ‘Mirror Check’ (1972) Joan Jonas performed a ritual inspection of
the most private parts of her body with a mirror, and in ‘Post Porn Mod-
ernism’ (1993) Annie Sprinkle staged the commodification of the pros-
titute as embarrassing spectacle.28 Moreover, female self-transformation
was staged as self-mutilation in order to denounce the victimisation of
the female body by male aggression. In her disturbing performance ‘Hot
Afternoon’ (1979) Gina Pane lacerated her body with razor blades, declar-
ing that the bleeding wounds symbolised the vagina,29 and in ‘Rhythm’
(1974) Marina Abramovic chained herself to a chair, inviting spectators to
use instruments of attack on her.30
Crimp satirically pinpoints the ambiguities and self-defeating implica-
tions in the arguments underlying these radical attempts to retrieve wom-
en’s control of the female body and to reverse the male perspectivism. By
staging her suicide attempt as an installation, Anne obliterates the dividing
line between life and work, ironically transforming Live Art into Death
Art. She takes the masochism of Body Art to the uttermost extreme. Noth-
26 See for instance Man Ray’s famous portrait of Kiki as a violoncello after an Ingres
painting with the two sound holes added to the photograph of her naked body. In the
1960s Yves Klein instrumentalised the naked body of models as ‘brushes’ to paint
with.
27 Jeannie Forte, ‘Women’s performance art: feminism and postmodernism’, Theater
Review XL (1988): 217–235.
28 Amongst the slides she projected during the event to document the numerous identities
into which she had transformed herself in her professional/private life, one showed her
as sex goddess ‘Anya’. As mentioned above, Crimp spent several months in New York
in 1991. For a detailed analysis of these feminist performances in the context of modern
pictorial art see the chapter ‘Twister: Looking into looking out’, in Rebecca Schneider,
The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 52–65.
29 Almhofer, Performance Art. Die Kunst zu leben, pp. 44–49.
30 Hans-Thiess Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren,
1999), p. 251f; Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since 1960, p. 213. Erika
Fischer-Lichte in The Show and the Gaze of Theatre, A European Perspective (Iowa
City: Iowa University Press, 1997), pp. 248–50, analyses the Abramovic performance,
‘The lips of Thomas’, where the performer acquired a new identity through the mutila-
tion of her body.
84 HEINER ZIMMERMANN

ing could be more radical than suicide as the ultimate negation of commu-
nication! This images the end of art as the end of the artist. Crimp’s satire
points up the limits of exorcising male aggression by way of public female
masochism. The progressive critic is, however, convinced that the radi-
calism of Anne’s installation – like the play itself – conveys no message,
‘She’d find the whole concept of ‘making a point’ ludicrously outmoded.
… the whole point of the exercise – i.e. these attempts on her own life
– points to that’ (pp. 46–47). He, however, contradicts himself by offering
a motive for Anne’s suicidal installation: ‘Anne’s only way to avoid being
a victim of the patriarchal structures of late twentieth century capitalism
is to become her own victim’ (p. 49). The cynical absurdity of these words
exposes contemporary amoral aestheticism as much as it does the feminist
performance artists’ futile hope of enlightening their audiences, their hope
for a ritual, Christ-like redemption of women through the vicarious self-
sacrifice of the performance artist.31
Attempts ironically parodies not only the images of woman produced
by the male perspective of the media in global capitalism but also feminist
attempts to disrupt these ways of seeing her. The play’s exclusion of the
protagonist’s presence breaks with the central convention of male com-
modity culture that sees woman above all as body, which means not seeing
her as woman. It thus also denounces the absence of woman in a culture in
which male projections of her conceal her reality.
The progressive critic in the play is, however, convinced that in the neo-
liberal consumer society of global capitalism ‘the radical gesture is simply
one more form of entertainment i.e. one more product … to/be consumed’
(p. 51). Martin Crimp is not willing to accept this state of affairs. His sat-
ire of neoliberal amoral and apolitical aestheticism leaves us in no doubt
about this. But he is also aware of the fact that he is part of the culture he
satirises. His critique does not arrogate a stance of moral superiority or
superior insight. Attempts shows up voyeurism in the media and in the arts,
but in doing so — just like Annie Sprinkle’s performances — inevitably
plays with its audience’s voyeurism. It criticises the male perspective on
woman, but wisely abstains from suggesting a ‘better’ perspective. In
short, it exposes the perversion of current discourses while openly admit-
ting that it has no alternatives to offer.
With The Country (2000) Crimp returned from postdramatic fragmen-
tation to the wholeness of drama as he saw it: ‘Attempts was a play that

31 Erika Fischer-Lichte in The Show and the Gaze of Theatre, p. 251, points out that unlike
traditional social rituals, such as wedding, burial or dance, the artistic ritual is not a
collective, but a subjective construction.
 MARTIN CRIMP’S ATTEMPTS ON HER LIFE 85

pulled plays apart, so this is a play where I attempt to put a play back
together again’.32 The text inscribes itself into a series of recent, dramatic
reflections on the meaning of pastoral at the turn of the millennium, such
as Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia or Howard Barker’s gloomy Ego in Arcadia.
The ‘eternal’ triangle of the married couple and the young lover with its
games of deception and power and its suffering puts Crimp in close prox-
imity to the stock-in-trade of boulevard comedy from Eugène Scribe’s The
Glass of Water to Harold Pinter’s The Collection and Samuel Beckett’s
Play. The reversion to the conventional dramatic form was, however, not
definitive as showed his latest piece Face to the Wall (2002). Similar to
Attempts the playlet stages the invention of a scenario. The performannce
could, however, be a script conference as well as the mise en scène of a
public testimony. The main speaker’s efforts to describe a massacre in a
school and the personality of the mass murderer fail. The causes for the
individual’s rupture with the laws of humane behaviour escape reason and
thus cannot be represented.

32 ‘The Enigma that is Mr Crimp’, interview with John Whitley, Telegraph (11 May
2000).