Attempts on Her Life

I saw the Rough Magic production of Martin Crimp's play Attempts on Her Life at the Project on Friday night. After a day of postgraduate research presentations, I was looking forward to seeing this show, especially because I have been walking past a poster on my way to campus for more than a month.

It's an interesting piece in that it offers lots of information with very little restrictions. Each audience member gets to navigate the varied if not contradictory information from each of 17 scenes. Each scene has a different tone or style while the content all circles around Anne. There was so much about the performance that was pleasurable that I cannot wait to see another version of the play in order to more fully appreciate the magnitude of the achievement.

In a discussion with one my department-mates, he suggested that this kind of play is most enjoyed by academics and critics who enjoy analyzing productions. I think that, had this production more prepared the audience for the responsibility of experiencing the unfolding of the stories, any theatre-goer could enjoy the production. I find there is much anxiety (for theatre professionals, academics, and "lay" persons) about not understanding the message of a play and that is part of why I find pieces like this so important: it resists a singular message and invites a multiplicity of reactions. There is the possibility in production to accentuate the ever widening maw of uncertainty or fragility in the possession of knowledge; this production did not emphasize this as much as I think the script allows, but I still appreciated the choices they did make.

They introduced comic extremes from the beginning (the second scene features a woman in green opposite a man in orange on an almost entirely white set; in the following scenes the audience discovers each character wears predominantly one color from a rainbow spectrum). By the time the performance reaches the scene with a rock song, there is an ever increasing sense of uncertainty as to how things will continue to unfold. There is a curved line along the entire back wall of the set; when a car is moved along it, there is a tangible manifestation of the question "How far will they go?" And this discovery is much of the excitement, energy, and enjoyment of watching the production.