Review - Attempts on Her Life - Melbourne University Student Union

That Girl
Originally performed in 1997, Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life is subtitled "17 scenarios for the theatre" is a play text that does not allocate specific lines to any particular speaker (as does the text of Mark Ravenhill’s Swimming Pool, no water which will be unveiled at Red Stitch in June). The scenarios are discussions about and descriptions of an enigmatic woman, Anne, Annie or Anja, her correct name is as elusive as her true profession or her creator's prose. As well as not assigning the dialogue to any one or more actors, Crimp does not indicate a time or places. As is done with ambiguous dialogue in actor’s training exercises, the director and performers make a theatrical interpretation. It is fascinating to read how other directors have tackled the elusive play and pleasant to think that, as performed here, how satisfying this production is. The actors and director are so on top on things that they take it further and ensure that it is entertaining at every minute as it is challenging. Watching, just as performing material like this is a kind of projective exercise not unlike the most famous of projective techniques, the Rorschach, where the viewer creates a meaning from an ambiguous visual stimulus in order to, in turn, creates a picture of their personality.

Crimp’s scenarios have inadvertently become a projective test uncovering the biggest global anxiety of the new millennium, post 9/11, terrorism. The scenarios provide a blueprint to create a picture of a woman who may have been a terrorist, a porn actor or tour guide, maybe a terrorist masquerading as a tour guide. Other scenarios offer her as an artist. Maybe the attempts on her life were due to her political allegiances or maybe they were self inflicted, like the porn appearances, as an intense artistic statement.

Director Susie Dee has located the play in a place where the effects of 9/11 are most commonly felt, an airport lounge (or is it an airport lounge? maybe another post 9/11 hot-spot like a tube station, maybe I’m just projecting!). The text is divided between twelve actors who have done wonders in absorbing it into scene and shape shifting experiences through speech and a subtle sound design. Crimp's writing, while seeming to invalidate any drama, is richly poetic whether describing an ashtray or a slit wrist and the actors make them into arcs of meaning, like a musical phrase or overlap words or lines or establish subtle rhythms that float the words across the three sides of the acting space used for most of the performance. The story may never resolve itself but Dee gives it a satisfying cyclic structure, returning everyone to their positions at the beginning. The actors eschew falling into characterisation but adopt a manner that is either explaining to each other the nature of the elusive woman as a way of setting a premise to hang the unravelling of the text on. As the play progresses it departs from that convention. With each scenario the cast evoke a number of theatrical forms harking back to the very earliest with the chorus familiar from Greek drama. Other forms are evoked as well in delivering the text, from communal church congregations or a United Nations Gathering where the speech is translated into French, or a pop song or the modern intimacy of a video diary (done Blair Witch Project style). At the plays centre the text even supports an argument about the nature of art and, no doubt planted by Crimp for exactly that purpose, the “redundancy” of traditional theatrical dialogue. Just as Dee uses theatrical forms from across history up on the stage, we in the audience are transported back to a kind of penny groundling experience at an Elizabethan theatre. Sitting in office chairs (appropriately borrowed from the Psych. Dept.) at roughly eye level to the surface of the stage we can swivel our attention from the left to the right or any one of the four sides of the room used in this production. Even before the play proper begins you could be forgiven for thinking you were at one of the best planned stagings at Malthouse. The acting is as sophisticated as the text and the design, lighting and sound design is as imaginative as any of the professional stagings of this challenging work.

I have no hesitation in recommending this student production but, to claryfy things, Melbourne University Union House Theatre productions are directed, designed, and produced by professional theatre practitioners with the support of the university student union. The director, for example has twenty or more years experience in production in direction. The resources are the student union's so realising the professional production and design is part of the achievement. The cast, creative and production crew are students but in this production it is difficult to judge where the professional ends and the non-professional begins in realising the professional contributions, especially in way the non professional actors take the ball, so to speak, and run with it.
Attempts on Her Life (2007) by Martin Crimp
Actors: Rhys Aconley-Jones, Chloe Boreham, Ananth Gopal, Kali Hulme, Joshua Lynzaat, Jen Mackie, Laura Maitland, Jan Mihal, Ella Roberts, Anna Teresa Scheer, Sophie Testart and Megan Twycross.
Director - Susie Dee
Sound Design and Composer – Kelly Ryall
Set and Costume Design – Jeminah Reidy
Lighting Design – Niklas Pajanti
Audio-Visual Design – Nicholas Verso
Guild Theatre, University of Melbourne
16 – 24 May 2008
85 minutes (no interval)

After this the upcoming show Zombie State is looking more tempting than ever (even without zombies)