And it is, in some respects, dated. It first opened in March 1997. Tony Blair was on the verge of being elected; Princess Diana was still alive; the war in Bosnia loomed large. Mobile phones, iPods and blogs had yet to exert their full grip and the Twin Towers were still standing. Wisely, Katie Mitchell’s production doesn’t attempt to update it with new gadgetry, but pins it in its time, so that its restless, splintered, slippery shape gives voice to the obsessions of the dying millennium. The term "director" for this production must be used loosely. In fact I feel fraudulent in adopting this title, as this project has been, and was always intended to be, a highly collaborative one, in which the divisions between actors, director, crew and designers are blurred by everyone having responsibility for making the creative and interpretative decisions about the performance. The programme notes, somewhat defensively one feels, leap to rebuff allegations of pretentiousness and there's no doubt that some quarters would raise this point against the piece - but regardless of the truth of that it remains a fascinating exploration of human individuality, nevertheless. In the recent National Theatre revival, Martin Crimp allowed Katie Mitchell to cut Scene 1, All Messages Deleted, and the text now permits this edit in all productions. But it seemed to me that the answer-phone messages in this scene serve as an introduction to the rest of the play. Phrases that we hear in this episode recur throughout the play, and I felt it was a useful way in to the play. The messages introduced us to a number of characters we were yet to meet, and so I opted not only to retain this scene, but to use it as the spring board for developing our production. So what we have, with 'Attempts on Her Life', is a number of attempts to define an individual, Anne, by people who have never known her, yet have a lot of information about her. Our production, whether by accident or design, extends this concept, and what we see is the construction of an identity for public consumption. The main perpetrators in our version would seem to be the pair of film executives pitching their ideas to each other in the second scene, yet their lead is followed by all manner of agencies engaged with piecing together what information they have. And where things don't fit, or they contradict each other, these agencies embellish with details that suit their own agendas. In a bizarre case of art mirroring art, the process you will see the characters engaging in tonight is exactly the same process that our ensemble has gone through over the last three or four months. If, during the course of the performance, you find yourself forming opinions, reaching conclusions about who Anne is only to be forced into re-evaluating these decisions a few minutes later as new details come to light, that is exactly what we have done at every rehearsal.

He went on to write a novel, 'Still Early Days', and 'An Anatomy', a collection of short stories. He entered a competition for local writers in 1981 run by the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. He won the competition with his play 'Living Remains' and the Orange Tree Theatre went on to stage many of his early pieces, including a number of translations of European plays. Finally, 'Attempts on Her Life' is a very modern play, and the use of these elements gives our production a similarly modern feel. I believe that we have been true to the spirit of Crimp's play, and have acquired new skills, explored further possibilities in the process. Does what we have done here reinforce the positives that new technology can bring to the theatre? Or does this technology simply get in the way? Ultimately, that is for you, the audience to decide, and I would be delighted if these decisions provoke the same diversity of views that 'Attempts on her Life' as a play seems to encourage. So whilst 'Attempts on her Life' has been criticised in the past for being pretentious, cold soulless, it seems to me that at its core is a very fundamental idea - the elusive nature of human identity, the struggle to define an individual despite knowing it is impossible to do so. We all have moments where we question who we are and try to find answers in other people, and there is nothing more human that a play could explore than this quest to make sense of our own existence and place in this world. Attempts on Her Life' is theatrical event, and therefore the audience's experience must remain a theatrical one. It has been a key consideration that the projections should never be used to do what theatre can do perfectly well on its own. The function of film has been to focus the audience's attention to something specific on the stage, to add another dimension to the action, to support the live work of the actors and perhaps to subvert it at times, but never to replace it.Why? Amateur companies tend to have much shorter runs, in smaller spaces and with much less time in which to construct and road-test elaborate sets, making physical construction very ineffective in terms of time and cost. But film lends almost infinite flexibility to a production. The audience can be transported to the four corners of the globe in an instant through the projection of simple, recognisable images. The visible space can be distorted, meaning entirely separate locations can concurrently occupy the same space as the performers, and the apparent limitations of what can take place in real time on stage are removed with the careful use of pre-recorded and edited footage. And all of these things are extremely portable, particularly in this digital age. He has been writer-in-residence for both theatre and television, including at Thames Television, the New Dramatists (New York) and the Royal Court Theatre in London and has adapted his own work for radio. He has won the Radio Times Drama Award and the John Whiting Award. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ On the way out of Attempts on Her Life I overheard a student discussing the production. “I’m sure they missed out the scene with the answering machines,” she said. “I love that scene!” Ten years on, and even Martin Crimp’s ultra-contemporary, postmodern piece has become a classic to the extent that devotees grieve when the text is changed. As it is, this Royal Court regular is well served in London by Tim Albery (director of the Metropolitan Opera’s recent “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the playwright’s partner in deconstructionist crime, and by a set from Gideon Davey that makes full, often eerie use of the Theater Upstairs’ two stage spaces. It’s not every writer who would pose much of his play in the form of a question, almost as if the language itself were interrogating the listener. But then it’s not every director who could ensure that the queries count — or, put another way, that a play about an elusive central character doesn’t elude us.

He became writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997 and several of his plays have been performed there. Possibly his most highly-regarded and most innovative play is 'Attempts on Her Life', a deliberately fragmented work which challenges an audience to re-define its notion of what constitutes a 'play' and might seem to question whether someone has any existence beyond the models we construct. This clash reached its peak towards the end of the play, in the scene in which Maddy Walker played a pretentious European art critic. While the scene was funny in its ruthless satire, behind the comedy lay a sinister idea. The artwork in the scene was about ‘ attempts on her life, ’ but the nature of these attempts remained ambiguous, with Crimp seeming to gesture towards the possibilities of suicide, murder, torture and so on, without ever laying his cards on the table. What was most disconcerting, and what made the production so powerful, was the sense in which all of the horrific events in the play became pieces of performance art, indistinguishable from one another. Similarly, the wide variety of interpretations which the play offers only intensifies the discomfort, and this production managed to leave these interpretive strands wide open. Crimp seems to suggest that these ‘ attempts on her life ’ could be genuine torture scenarios in a dystopian nightmare. Or they could mean absolutely nothing at all — and that is what is most frightening. Thomson and his actors balanced the comic with the deeply sinister, in what was a stunning production of an immensely powerful play. Applaud what he is doing or not (many may be reminded of the Woody Allen line about “achiev(ing) total heaviosity”), Crimp mines a recognizable vein, and one can imagine American directors like Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars desperate to get their hands on the text.Fortuitously, we had ten actors, and there are ten different people leaving messages, Giving each actor one message, we tried a couple of improvisations. First each actor was to respond as though the message was left for them, and second they were to act as the character who leaves the message. The results were compelling and varied, but each emerging character seemed to contribute to a coherent sense of who Anne was and what has happened to her. This mysterious, unseen woman became someone who has gone missing after getting involved in all manner of dangerous or immoral activities, including prostitution, terrorism, fencing stolen goods, but also a woman who started out with philanthropic intent. Not just in terms of aesthetics, but also thematically. The media is a central presence in the play, and therefore our conspicuous cameras and projectors as well as what they produce are directly related to the ideas in the text. There is a point to what is being said on the stage by having these things. If they were irrelevant, they wouldn't be there.