Contemporary Theatre Review

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Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp's Attempts on

her Life

Mary Luckhurst

To cite this article: Mary Luckhurst (2003) Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp's Attempts on her
Life, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13:1, 47-60, DOI: 10.1080/1048680032000086468

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1048680032000086468

Published online: 17 Sep 2010.

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05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 47 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
1. Martin Crimp, Attempts
on her Life (London,
Faber and Faber Ltd,
1997), pp. 46–47.
2. Crimp, Attempts, p. ii.
3. Alastair Macauley, see
Theatre Record, 12–25
March 1997, 17:6,
pp. 311–312.
Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 13(1), 2003, 47–60
Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp’s
Attempts on her Life
Mary Luckhurst
With respect to you I think she’d [the artist] find the whole concept of
‘making a point’ ludicrously outmoded. If any point is being made at all
it’s surely the point that the point that’s being made is not the point and
never has in fact been the point. It’s surely the point that the search for a
point is pointless and that the whole point of the exercise – i.e. these
attempts on her own life – points to that.1
These words from scenario 11 of Crimp’s Attempts on her Life
evidence familiar postmodern resistances to grand narrative, fixed
meaning, and closed, non-reflexive modes of critique while pushing
those resistances to a point of implosion. In this scene Crimp flirts
skillfully with received postmodern clichés, which suggest that art is
apolitical, morally relative, and made meaningful only through its self-
referentiality – a trope that seems to be reinforced through the majority
of the voices in the play and their obsession with the process of
constructing narrative. The relentless self-reflexivity of Attempts on her
Life, required also in the design and acting styles (‘Let each scenario in
words – the dialogue – unfold against a distinct world – a design –
which best exposes its irony’2) posed a serious dilemma for reviewers of
the première at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 7 March 1997.
Some implied that they had been critically wrong footed, responding as
though Crimp had made a pre-emptive strike on their profession and
codified it as meaningless; Alastair Macauley of the Financial Times
was excessively hostile:
To say that it is postmodern is like saying that the Pope is Catholic; it is
also post-civilisation, post-truth, post-art, post-feeling, post-teeth, post-
everything. . . . Who cares? Not for a moment does the play suggest that
its author does. . . . His [Crimp’s] method is far more depersonalised than
the depersonalised modernity on which he pretends to comment.3
Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1026-7166 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online
© 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/1048680022000025516
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 48 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
48
Attempts on her Life, Royal Court 1997. From left to right: David Fielder, Howard Ward, Ashley Jensen,
photo: Ivan Kyncl
4. Ibid, pp. 312–313;
respectively Michael
Coveney in the
Observer, Shaun Usher
in the Daily Mail, and
Robert Butler in the
Independent on
Sunday.
5. Ibid, p. 311.
6. Ibid, p. 313.
7. Ibid, p. 311.
Others offered cautious praise, describing it variously as ‘an important
new play . . . brilliant’, ‘radical’ and ‘a piece of anti-theatre’,4 but the
overwhelming impression was that reviewers were unsure what to think,
oscillating between admiration and condemnation. The Independent’s
Paul Taylor asked whether despite the play’s ‘extraordinary flights of
eloquence’ it was ‘just cleverly knowing and darkly comic about its own
ingenious futility’;5 Roger Foss in What’s On argued that ‘artfully cryptic,
deliberately inconclusive and depersonalised though it is, it stands
completely alone as a coherent and poetic perspective on the underlying
violence of late twentieth-century corporate global hegemony’, but
concluded that the piece ‘never engages you at the human level of
feelings or emotions’;6 Nicholas de Jongh began his Evening Standard
review with the ‘uneasy feeling that in Attempts on her Life Martin
Crimp has fired a warning shot to suggest what the brave new theatre
of the twenty-first century will look like – both on stage and page’, but
ultimately judged that ‘the final impact is of a mannered cleverness, an
arid imposition of a dramatic scheme which casts no serious illumina-
tion, stirs no thought or induces any significant emotion’, rounding off
his review with the words: ‘Just heartfelt pretension.’7
It seems to me that most London critics swallowed the very ideo-
logical line that Crimp trailed as ironic bait to them; earnestly blind to
the obvious postmodern tease of assertions like ‘the search for a point
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 49 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
8. On 27 May 2002 in the
Dixon Drama Studio,
York, a special
performance for Max
Stafford-Clark, to
celebrate the start of his
honorary Professorship
at the University of
York.
9. There are no speech-
prefixes in Crimp’s The
Country (Faber and
Faber Ltd, London,
2000), but three
characters are named in
the dramatis personae
and stage directions
clarify who is speaking.
49
Attempts on her Life, Royal Court 1997. From left to right: Danny Cerqueira and Etela
Pardo, photo: Ivan Kyncl
is pointless’, unquestioning of the purpose of Crimp’s insistence on
maintaining maximum irony throughout, too many critics allowed
themselves to be gulled into crediting the idea that text and performance
might all be surface gloss. Ironically most believed in the lies the text
propagates about its own senselessness and unsurprisingly found it
impossible to locate political meanings at all, grasping immediately for
that well-known postmodern trope that privileges lack of meanings as
‘the real meaning’. In this article I am going to argue that Attempts on
her Life is the most radically interrogative work in western mainstream
theatre since Beckett. My own interest in the difficulties of representing
the female on stage, as well as the performative challenges Crimp’s text
poses, led me to direct my own recent production.8 I write, therefore, as
someone who has interpreted this piece practically; though as directors
know this never results in a definitive understanding of a play, only a
deeper acquaintance with the questions it throws up. I will argue that
Crimp deconstructs the difficulties of representing the female onstage in
ways that are at once sophisticated and provocative for mainstream
theatre, but theoretically troubling. To begin I will outline other reasons
that make any critique of Attempts on her Life a complicated task and
frame it in relation to the author’s previous work. I should add that I
am willing to risk being labelled ‘ludicrously outmoded’ – if that is what
occupying a political position means in this context.
Attempts on her Life claims its anti-conventionality both in form and
its repudiation of distinct characters. The absence of speech-prefixes
allows for radically variant casts, the text frequently indicating issues
of sex and ethnicity.9 Crimp describes it as ‘17 Scenarios for the
Theatre’ and specifies that it is a piece ‘for a company of actors whose
composition should reflect the composition of the world beyond the
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50

Attempts on her Life, special performance for Max Stafford-Clark, 27 May 2002, Director: Mary Luckhurst. The
Dixon Studio, York. Scenario 11, Untitled. Left to right: Benedict Hitchins, Eammon O’Dwyer, Dan Ford, Fran
Bucknall, Mark Edel-Hunt, Nik Miller, Rob Leigh, photo: Rob Weaver

10. Crimp, Attempts, theatre’,10 a comment that points his disparagement with theatrical
pp. ii–iii. insularity, exclusivity, and perhaps also with managerial timidity
towards large casts for new plays. The scenarios are all distinct from one
another though each focuses compulsively on constructing narratives
around ‘Anne’, sometimes referred to as ‘Anya’, ‘Annie’, ‘Anny’, and
11. Ibid, see pp. 12, 14–16, ‘Annushka’11 but mostly simply as ‘she’. ‘Anne’ has multiple identities,
21–23, 30–35, 56. occupies multiple locations (five continents are named in scenario 6
alone, and scenario 13 presents her as the tool of alien life forces), is
represented variously as victim and perpetrator, is absent and silent for
the majority of the piece, can be both person and thing (scenario 14 posits
12. Ibid, p. 59. her as ‘a cheap cigarette’, ‘Ecstasy’, and ‘the edge of a knife’;12 scenario 7
as a car, ‘The New Anny’) and is posited as sexually and temporally fluid
13. Ibid, p. 60. – apparently girl, boy, man and god.13 Some of the more prominent
representations identify ‘Anne’ as a terrorist, a drug-dealer, an artist, a
third- or second-world sex worker, a refugee, the girl next door, an
American right-wing fundamentalist, and the archetypal female object of
desire in European high-art narratives. Different voices seek to conjure
‘Anne’: a mother and father, a gaggle of art critics, sinister interrogators,
border guards and accusers, advertisers, salespersons and corporate
executives, showbiz entertainers, inexplicably authoritative narrators,
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 51 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
14. Ibid, see scenarios 2, 3,
4, 8, 9, 13, 17.
15. I have not been able to
ascertain whether this
actor was European or
South American.
51
Attempts on her Life, special performance for Max Stafford-Clark, 27 May 2002,
Director: Mary Luckhurst. The Dixon Studio, York. Scenario 13, Communicating with
Aliens. Dan Ford and Rob Leigh, photo: Rob Weaver
apparent sexual abusers, friends and lovers. The voices that return most
often are those of the corporate executives, who appear to be film or
advertising buffs searching for a commercial hit, spin doctors of narrative
with repellently insatiable appetites for fantasy and invention.14 They
conceive numerous versions of ‘Anne’, getting off on each others’ ideas
and relishing their individual control to turn ‘Anne’ into anything they
want: like children pulling the wings and legs off an insect ‘Anne’ is
tormented or destroyed at a whim, physically abused, tortured or
sexually exploited or in moments of magnanimity imagined to be an
authority herself.
In addition to the complications of ‘Anne’, Crimp’s renunciation of
the convention of characters with designated lines also serves to
destabilise attempts at interpretation. It is for the director and/or actors
to decide who speaks when, how many speaking and silent actors are
used in each scenario. The casting decisions, therefore, are weighted with
far greater implications than they would be in a character-driven play:
for the première, director Tim Albery chose to balance genders with four
men and four women; in terms of nationality he selected five Britons, a
Portuguese-speaker,15 a Nigerian and a Serbian. One actor, the Nigerian,
was black. Of course it is debatable whether this selection conforms to
Crimp’s ‘world beyond the theatre’ – which world in which community
and culture, and seen through whose eyes? A wholly male cast, for
example, inflects the play with an over-powering patriarchal politics
and straightforwardly renders men the Enemy; a wholly female cast
imbues the compulsive fantasies constructed around ‘Anne’ with another
political and sexual agenda and gives the impression that women
dominate capitalist systems, which they do not. A preponderance of
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 52 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
52
16. Ibid, p. 65.
17. Ibid, p. 60.
18. Ibid, pp. 30 and 65. In
scenario 1 Crimp
suggests that a speech is
‘spoken in e.g. Czech’,
p. 1.
19. British Library Modern
Playscript Collection
(MPS), 1642. Not
dated.
20. MPS, 2954.
21. MPS, 3670, title sheet.
Originally a radio play,
which won the 1986
Radio Times Drama
Award.
22. Martin Crimp, Plays 1,
London: Faber and
Faber Ltd, 2000, p. 9.
Also contains Getting
Attention, Play with
Repeats and The
Treatment.
23. Ibid.
24. Martin Crimp, No One
Sees the Video, Getting
Attention, Stage Kiss
(London: Nick Hern,
1991), p. vii.
white actors explicitly encodes criticism of the West, and the presence
of non-white actors suggests political tensions and complicities.
There is also the vexed question of ‘Anne’ and whether the director
chooses to inscribe a silent or alternative presence in certain scenes,
through an actor’s body, film projection, television-monitor, or disem-
bodied voice. Albery used film and photographic montage in scene six
and represented ‘Anne’ live only in scenario 16, the one place where
Crimp indicates that ‘the principal speaker is a very young woman’.16
Here the woman is clearly speaking words written for her, eventually
suffering a collapse, and hears her speech performed by other figures
while she is revived.
The multi-lingualism of Attempts on her Life also affects the politics
of its performance. Crimp is a sensitive and skilled dramatic translator
and, as his work on Molière’s The Misanthrope (1996), Ionesco’s The
Chairs (1997), Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love (1999), Genet’s The
Maids (1999) and Koltès’s Roberto Zucco (1997) shows, particularly
alert to linguistic rhythms and nuances of meaning. In the première
actors spoke Portuguese, Serbian and Japanese; the text prescribes only
Japanese,17 otherwise providing stage directions (in three scenarios) that
specify languages from different continents or regions, Africa, South
America, and Eastern Europe.18 Scenario 10, ‘Kinda Funny’ is notated
in American English and located in the States, and of course actors can
be asked to speak English using accents that carry particular political
resonance for particular audiences. Crimp deliberately allows scope for
the insertion of topical local and global politics.
Whilst Attempts on her Life is more radically experimental than
Crimp’s previous stage plays, his fascination with the sexual objectifica-
tion of women and women as victims and perpetrators of violence is
evident from the earliest works. The first plays demonstrate a much
clearer interest in anti-realist performance than the plays of the late-
1980s and early 1990s, and with Attempts on her Life Crimp returns to
anti-realism more tellingly, using it to interrogate his profound ambiva-
lence about theatrical spectacle as a vehicle that implicitly renders all
involved manipulative, brutal and voyeuristic. Living Remains
(1983–1984?), about a woman trapped in a cubicle, owes much to
Beckett;19 A Variety of Death-Defying Acts (1985), set in café-bar Grand
Guignol, and featuring a female protagonist called Miss Kopinski, is
reminiscent of Wedekind and German expressionism in its use of cabaret
and circus motifs;20 and Definitely the Bahamas (1987) comprises three
‘plays for consecutive performance’, each set in different locations.21 In
Dealing with Clair (1988) the eponymous, enigmatic, central character
patently feels morally and emotionally compromised by her work as an
estate agent, the materialist expectations of family and sexual expec-
tations of male clients and simply decides to ‘vanish’ into another life
and identity.22 Play with Repeats (1989) concentrates on loneliness,
poverty, random violence and male sexual predation.23 Crimp describes
No One Sees the Video (1990) as ‘a post-consumer play, i.e. it describes
a world in which the equation of consumption with happiness . . . is
axiomatic’;24 in it he ironises market research and again focuses on the
sexual objectification of women. Getting Attention (1992) features
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 53 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
25. Crimp explains that the
play was inspired by a
newspaper article on
child abuse, Ibid, p. vii.
53
Attempts on her Life, special performance for Max Stafford-Clark, 27 May 2002,
Director: Mary Luckhurst. The Dixon Studio, York. Scenario 5, The Camera Loves You.
Left to right: Eammon O’Dwyer and Nancy Walker, photo: Rob Weaver
Sharon, a young child who is heard but never seen, and slowly and
agonisingly tortured to death by her mother and stepfather. In The
Treatment (1993) Anne is a partial fore-shadowing of ‘Anne’ in
Attempts on her Life, a woman who is complicit in her husband’s abuse
of her, and who is sexually and emotionally used by two film executives
who are interested not in her but in the salacious abuse narratives they
wish to invent around her. The Country (2000) owes a debt to Pinter in
both form and content and centres on a husband’s betrayal of his wife,
his inability to love, and his exploitation of marriage as an exchange of
material goods in return for sexual favours.
As varied as Crimp’s plays have been there is a consistent interest in
representing women as victims of patriarchy, as misunderstood, sexually
exploited, emotionally abused, marginalised or silenced in some way.
The child, Sharon, in Getting Attention, is an unequivocal victim,
powerless to defend herself or ask for help;25 but Crimp more often blurs
the boundaries between abuse and complicity. Crimp’s preoccupation
with representing violence to women is certainly rooted in real political
issues: Dealing with Clair, for example, is heavily redolent of the
mysterious disappearance of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh in the 1980s,
which received high-profile media coverage in England. The case bred
widespread disquiet because foul play was suspected but no body ever
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 54 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
54
26. India Song is in
Maguerite Duras, Four
Plays, trans. Barbara
Bray (London: Oberon,
1992).
27. Patrick Marber, Closer
(Faber and Faber Ltd,
London: 1997), p. 63
and p. 99.
28. Ibid, p. 103. Cf, The
story of Alice Ayres.
29. Geraldine Harris,
Staging Femininities:
Performance and
Performativity
(Manchester University
Press: Manchester and
New York, 1999),
p. 16.
found, and because it highlighted the vulnerability of women even at
their places of work. In Crimp’s play Clair simply vanishes, refusing
confrontation or negotiation and thus silencing herself, but the implica-
tion is that there is no place of safety and security for her, no place that
is free from the sexual and commercial exploitation of women. In
market economies women’s sexuality is overwhelmingly represented as
a commodity but with the globalisation of the markets the international
commodification of women is now a greater phenomenon than ever
before: it is also this global backdrop in Attempts on her Life that makes
its interrogations more ambitious than those in his previous plays.
The use of absence and silence to illustrate the paradoxical conun-
drum of representing women as subjects has frequently been exploited
in modern drama. To take two examples, Marguerite Duras
(1914–1996) and Patrick Marber problematise the representation of
women in their respective plays India Song (1993) and Closer (1997).
Duras interrogates female presence through complex voice-over: frag-
ments of a woman’s life, Anne-Marie Stretter’s, are narrated by voices
who recollect details fitfully. Anne-Marie Stretter is played by a mainly
silent performer and the inter-relations between moving body, the
memories of the narrators and their words yield a mesmeric and enig-
matic effect. Though radically experimental in form, the Anne-Marie
Stretter narrative is utterly conventional: a beautiful woman lives, loves,
despairs and dies; and when Anne-Marie Stretter does speak she is
represented unequivocally as the object of male desire.26 Silence and
absence are used to engage with questions of how a woman’s story may
be told, but it seems the substance of the dominant tragic narrative not
only goes unchallenged but also is reinforced. Marber’s more formally
conservative play uses the character of drop-out, Alice, to highlight the
raptorial, inter-necine savagery of London’s professional classes. Alice
is herself manipulator and manipulated but is powerful only in so far as
she serves the other characters’ sexual and artistic fantasies and para-
doxically always the object of both male desire and male misogyny. Dan,
Larry and Anna play out their own wish-fulfilments through her, but
recognise only when she is dead that Alice’s identity has been a living
performance; that she was a ‘no one’ about whom they knew nothing,
not even her real name (which Alice earlier tells Larry but he disbelieves)
– ‘plain Jane Jones’.27 With her death Marber not only ensures Alice’s
tragic status he also lends her Romantic transcendence by implying that
Anna, Larry and Dan have in some way been ‘saved’ through her.28 Thus
Alice’s absence becomes a form of divine presence and is as much a
fantasy as those Marber implicitly condemns in his characters. Despite
the strategies that both playwrights employ to challenge stereotypical
representations of women, both ultimately heroise their protagonists,
deny them significant agency, and sentence them to death. Crimp goes
some way towards interrogating idealised constructs in The Treatment
as I will go on to demonstrate, but Attempts on her Life opens up the
investigation radically by examining a whole series of received, globally-
framed narratives about women which both lend and deny agency.
If ‘historically, within patriarchal discourse, “woman” has functioned
as a sign with no reference to the “real”,’ as Harris asserts,29 then
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 55 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
30. Crimp, Attempts, sc. 5,
p. 19. The other song is
scenario 14. In the
première they were
respectively performed
as a rap and a song and
dance showbiz routine.
31. Jean-Francois Lyotard,
The Postmodern
Condition (Manchester:
University Press,
Manchester, 1984).
32. Crimp, Attempts, sc. 5,
p. 20. Crimp’s past
employment as a
market researcher has
influenced the form as
well as the content of
his later plays, see
author’s note in Getting
Attention (Nick Hern),
p. xi.
33. Crimp, Plays 1, p. 331.
55
Attempts on her Life is an inexorable exposé of those signs, and ‘Anne’
functions as a complex mirroring device revealing only the pathologies
of her inventors. Those inventors share the same symbolic voice: though
a myriad of different voices seem to be posited through the absence of
speech-prefixes, they all in fact serve the same function and within
individual scenarios share the same syntactical and poetic rhythms.
Scenario 1 sets up ‘Anne’s’ absence through a series of telephone answer-
machine messages, a series of disembodied recorded voices suggesting
different continents and different situations, some sinister, some appar-
ently banal; but all of them are in search of the object of desire, all speak
into a monologic emptiness, and all mark the start of the hunt. Scenarios
2 to 17 mainly contain three kinds of narrative voice, the clearly accu-
satory, the apparently benign but politically malevolent, and the ideal-
istic. All the voices operate ironically in relation to the narrative they are
telling; the hunt is never-ending because the prey is imagined, ‘Anne’ a
fantasy-repository for extreme kinds of wish-fulfilment. The fact of
‘Anne’s’ non-existence accounts for her fabricators obsessive engage-
ment with attempting to narrate her: only in narration can ‘Anne’ be
imagined to be real and only through repeated attempts to resolve the
irresolvable, that is – to summon her presence – can the idea of ‘Anne’
be sustained. The two songs, clearly Brechtian in the way they refer to
other scenarios, comment explicitly on this paradox:
We’re talking of a plan to be
OVERWHELMED by the sheer totality
and utterly believable three-dimensionality
THREE-DIMENSIONALITY
of all the things that Anne can be
ALL THE THINGS THAT ANNE CAN BE30
It is arguable that ‘Anne’ becomes a grand narrative, filling the hole
that the alleged collapse of other grand narratives has created.31 ‘Anne’
points to a compulsive desire to create out of women the most polymor-
phously-perverse, ultimately consumable product in the global market
economy, a commodity invented only to be exchanged, guaranteed to
yield ‘the sexiest scenario’ for any consumer.32 If at one level she is
imagined, at another level ‘Anne’ is clearly an interrogative device
deployed to expose misogyny and exploitation of women, both institu-
tionally and internationally, with corporate mentalities in first world
countries implicated before anyone else. This is also the case with Anne
in The Treatment, whom film executive, Andrew, claims to love because
her life is ‘real’; in fact it is his own assumption of power over her
supposed victim status that he finds (both literally and psychologically)
gratifying. Anne’s tale of her husband’s abuse of her excites Andrew
because, as she tells him, he is otherwise ‘emotionally dead’.33 Perversely
the narrative invention and elaboration of her pain reminds Andrew that
he is alive and sustains him:
I’ll tell you what excites us, Anne. It’s because you’re here and now. You’re
in the moment and of the moment. You’re real. Because what are people
doing out there? Out there they are listening to Schubert on authentic
 56
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 56 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM

The montaged face made up of many women’s faces seemed the most precise way of representing ‘Anne’s’ multiple identities and artificiality
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 57 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM

57

pianos. They are singing Bach at A-four-fifteen. . . . These are people,

Anne, who are allergic to the time we are living in. They can’t eat the food.
They can’t touch one another’s body. They can’t breathe the air. Their
lives must be spent behind a screen or they will have a respiratory
crisis. . . . But I’m talking about loving a person’s soul as revealed through
their eyes. You have the eyes of the city. (He runs his fingertips over her
eyes and down her cheek.) Please don’t mention this to my wife.

Anne is no more to him than a body to be plundered and a fantasy

to be indulged: Andrew’s major crisis is the realisation that Anne is a
powerful agent in her husband’s abuse of her; she has demonstrated will
and may not be as easily controlled as he imagined. Whether Anne is
finally liberating herself when she runs out of the house or is running in
fear is not made explicit but now implicated an author of her own life
she meets the fate of the traditional heroine and dies – in this case shot
by Andrew’s business-partner wife:
34. Ibid, p. 385. She ran at me. It was a threat. I reacted.34

Though Anne’s complicity and the ironic manner of her death compli-
cate her function, she is still a modern version of a traditional trope that
links the representations of the corrupted ingénue with an aesthetic of
death.
In Attempts on her Life Crimp finds a way of both foregrounding and
interrogating deeply embedded cultural pathologies that align represen-
tations of women with death. The title implies suicide and assassination
as well as attempts to narrate, while simultaneously conveying the idea
that narration can never be completed, that the project in itself is
unrealisable. Scenario 11 deconstructs these notions most overtly, its
header a deliciously ironic ‘Untitled (100 Words)’; here a set of ferociously
egomaniac art critics view ‘Anne’s’ works of her own suicide attempts,
debating their legitimacy as art. Familiar arguments about the blurring
of life and art are rehearsed: if they accept the work as a record of real
35. Crimp, Attempts, p. 50. suicide attempts then they become ‘mere voyeurs in Bedlam’;35 if ‘Anne’
is only faking the work has no artistic integrity; but, they conclude that
if they accept the work as a self-conscious performance of suicide ‘Anne’
supposedly empowers herself by performing her own marginality, thus
avoiding ‘being a victim of the patriarchal structures of late twentieth-
36. Ibid, p. 49. century capitalism’ by becoming her own victim.36 Performance itself is
legitimised as the most authentic art form; its very illusoriness privileged
as more real than reality, its hyper reality apparently a statement of a
37. Ibid, p. 51. ‘post-radical’, ‘post-human’ world.37 The nod at Baudrillard’s simulacra
38. Jean Baudrillard, is clear,38 but the critics only flirt with jargon and ideas (as does Crimp),
Simulations are intent on nullifying the artist herself and reducing her work to bland
(Semiotext(e): New
York, 1983). formulae in order to foreground their own performances as critics
through the use of sensationalist vocabulary and tabloid extremism.
They do not seriously address individual postmodern theories, and the
chilling absurdity of their debate, the ludicrousness of their propositions,
the reactionary triteness of their claims – ‘Anne’s’ work is ‘a religious
39. Crimp, Attempts, object’, theatre ‘for a world in which theatre itself has died’, and one
pp. 50–52. more product to be consumed39 – only condemn them as brutalistic
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 58 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM

58

Attempts on her Life, special performance for Max Stafford-Clark, 27 May 2002,
Director: Mary Luckhurst. The Dixon Studio, York. Scenario 11, Untitled. Mark Edel-
Hunt as a pretentious art critic, photo: Rob Weaver

voyeurs whose authority depends on the symbolic massacre of the other

– in this case women. ‘Anne’ doubly becomes their victim, first as a
female artist whose work is marginalised, and second through the asser-
tion that her work be heroised only on the basis of its apparent desire
to self-victimise. The insertion of ‘Anne’s’ poetic lists of words at various
points in the scenario, whether spoken live, recorded or projected, serve
to highlight that her art operates outside conventional critical territory,
but also that it is irrelevant to these critics who consume and interpret
it solely in order to elevate themselves. ‘Anne’ is the object of sacrifice,
and her juxtapositions of ideas and words, for example ‘woman, abuse’
40. Ibid, p. 51. suggest that patriarchal cultures are little more than dictatorships.40
In scenario 16, the only one that explicitly states that ‘Anne’, ‘a very
41. Ibid, p. 65. young woman’,41 speaks, she suffers a verbal breakdown, a symbolic
death. On one level ‘Anne’ is a second or third world sex worker and a
particularly potent victim of sexual exploitation; on another level she is
a performer required to narrate a ghastly account of the child sex trade
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 59 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
42. Ibid, p. 69.
43. Ibid, pp. 70–73. The
songs, of course, imply
music but it is not
specified.
44. Crimp, Attempts, p. 73.
45. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s
House and Other Plays,
trans. Peter Watts
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984),
pp. 202–204; Hedda
Gabler and Other
Plays, trans. Una
Ellis-Fermor
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978), p. 363.
46. In my production the
actress in question,
Nancy Walker, suffered
evident (and real)
distress each time she
performed this scenario
which exacerbated my
guilt as a director and
the guilt of the cast and
musicians. It was also
the scene that the
audience found almost
unendurable but no one
walked out.
59
and Crimp insists on maintaining an ambiguity over her real or stage
fright.42 This scenario also contains the only specifically musical stage
direction, ‘passionate gypsy violin music’ which intensifies and climaxes
with the ritualised narrations of her oppressors/prompts and trans-
lator.43 The music acts as an ironic counterpoint to the horror that
‘Anne’ must suppress and to her apparent breakdown, the voices of the
oppressors uniting to drown her out with a repellently euphoric
construction of her as a woman with all-powerful, divinely redemptive
qualities.
Anne will save us from the
anxiety of our century . . .44
Crimp may be borrowing from Ibsen’s use of musical irony in Nora’s
tarantella scene and Hedda’s wild piano playing moments before her
suicide,45 but whereas Ibsen’s musical notation indicates a space for
rebellion and sexual liberation, (though occupied in desperation and
strictly regulated) ‘Anne’ is not permitted even a brief transgressive
moment. Unlike Nora and Hedda ‘Anne’ is not allowed agency: she
neither dances nor sings and there is no private narrative of her woes:
words are the instruments of her oppression but they are also ‘Anne’s’
only means of fighting back in this scenario and it is significant that
Crimp indicates that she cannot overcome her fear to do so.46 The music,
a clichéd symbol of wild abandon, is a grotesque offset to the policing
of any self-expression from ‘Anne’, onto whom fantasies are continually
projected but who is herself denied desire. ‘Anne’s’ metatheatrical drying
in this scenario and the covering of her failed performance become a
metaphor for the spiral of systematic erasure of the female subject, and
her withdrawal into silence/death is less an example of Kristevan
semiotic resistance than paralysis induced by fear: as self-interrogatory
as ‘Anne’s’ ‘performance’ is Crimp’s political exposure of her brutalisa-
tion is clear.
Attempts on her Life could be described as an interrogation machine,
implicating theatre management, production, reception, and above all
the position and treatment of women. It matches Beckett in its interro-
gation of theatre as a practice, and drives Brechtian concepts of aliena-
tion to an extreme. It exploits postmodern styles of metatheatricality in
order to force a confrontation with its spectators. Its form is brilliantly
radical and like a virus Attempts on her Life consumes whatever theat-
rical cell it is released into. Its uncompromising alienation and implied
complicities disturbed critics, much of whose criticism is undercut with
a longing for the cosy familiarity of naturalistic theatre. In terms of
content, however, Crimp’s play is limited. The dual critique of global
capitalism and patriarchy is evident but all the voices connected with
that critique are deluded, fascistic, and morally corroded. The effect of
this is to reduce maleness to a monolithically sadistic and psychopathic
construct – in every scenario. A further problem is the repeated sugges-
tion of women’s complicity in male abuse of them. This suggests itself
as a tease but the idea repeats itself rather too often to be dismissed so
easily and Crimp emphatically airs the idea in previous plays. Yet no
detailed interrogation of complicity occurs in any of the scenarios so
05 CTR 13-1 Luckhurst (JB/D) Page 60 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 1:34 PM
60
47. Crimp’s own words at a
post-show discussion of
Face to the Wall, Royal
Court, 19 March 2002.
48. Ibid.
49. Martin Crimp, Face to
the Wall, London,
Faber, 2002.
that, again, the charge appears generalised to a degree that is discon-
certing. Possibly, Crimp’s direction to play every scenario to optimal
levels of irony is part of the problem: the gap that is opened is between
a delusion about ‘Anne’ and ‘Anne’ as an unknowable/unknown subject.
If ‘Anne’ does not and cannot exist, then we are no further forward
theoretically. What are the gender politics pointed to by the title and
each scenario? A weakness of the play is that, crudely, its politics might
be summarised as: men are wicked and brutal, women are less wicked
and brutal but may be partially to blame for their own victimhood.
Clearly Crimp’s ironies and interrogative devices seek to lift it away
from anything so crude, and perhaps the irony is another tease – a post-
ironic ploy, but it is very telling that Crimp tried to write a sequel,
Attempts on his Life, for two years but found it impossible because the
play ‘kept exploding into impossible scenarios of savagery and
violence’.47 He has described his most recent play, Face to the Wall, as
a ‘kind of footnote to Attempts on her Life’ and its brevity and brutality
speak for themselves:48 once again it is the rehearsal of a narrative, an
acting scenario but also recognisably the phenomenon of ‘going postal’,
in which a man walks into a school and randomly shoots both adults
and children. It ends with a father singing a blues song to his son, and
throwing hot tea in his son’s face, earlier references in the play clarifying
that the spiral of male violence is learned as an infant and played out in
adulthood.49 It seems clear to me that Crimp could not write a full-
length sequel because whilst Attempts on her Life is a play, which is
obviously concerned with the objectification of women, it is also a
devastating critique of male barbarism. Crimp’s representation of men
is currently so excessively negative that there is no new territory to which
he can travel, nothing other he can reveal than more butchery. Attempts
on her Life is unquestionably a landmark in terms of form, but if Crimp
is to progress as a theatre-maker he needs to adopt a more sophisticated
approach to subject matter. His political point, to return to my title, is
clear. Paradoxically it is too clear, though the veil of received post-
modern tropes seemed to confuse many. The question for the next play
is whether Crimp, as Master Interrogator, is prepared to interrogate the
dystopic fixity of his gender politics.