Attempts on Her Life

EN302: European Theatre

European Theatre Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre:

‘For centuries a paradigm has dominated European theatre that clearly distinguishes it from non-European theatre traditions. For example, Indian Kathakali or Japanese Noh theatre are structured completely differently and consist essentially of dance, chorus and music, highly stylized ceremonial procedures, narrative and lyric texts, while theatre in Europe amounted to the representation, the ‘making present’ of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play. Bertolt Brecht chose the term ‘dramatic theatre’ to designate the tradition that his epic ‘theatre of the scientific age’ intended to put an end to. In a more comprehensive sense (and also including the majority of Brecht’s own work), however, this term can be used to designate the core of European theatre tradition in modern times. (2006: 21)

Plot Aristotle’s hamartia, anagnorisis, and

peripeteia Aristotle described structure as the ‘most

important of all’ dramatic elements: ‘A beginning is that which does not itself

follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.’

Importance of causality (Oresteia, Miss Julie, Galileo)

Recognition ‘Playwright’ was synonymous with ‘teacher’ in

Ancient Greek. Pursuit of ‘truth’ in Oedipus:

‘light’ (p. 187), ‘stubborn’ (p. 188), ‘terror’ (p. 196), ‘both parent and murderer’ (p. 201), ‘no comfort’ (p. 202)

‘Seeing’ and Teiresias Moral of Tartuffe:

‘Learn to distinguish between virtue, / Real and feigned.’ (p. 72)

Catharsis: ‘…the bringing about of affective recognition and

solidarity by means of the drama and the affects represented and transmitted to the audience within its frame’ (Lehmann 2006: 21).

Imitation

Mimesis contrasted with diegesis in classical thought

Central to the project of Naturalism Role of symbolism (Hedda Gabler, Spring

Awakening, Yerma) Both Zola and Brecht proposed a ‘theatre

for the scientific age’ – what did this mean in each case?

Impact of photography? Film? TV? Internet?

Conflict Agon / thesis and antithesis:

Antigone and Creon are forced to choose between family and state.

Pentheus must choose between order and chaos: ‘When I come out, I’ll either be fighting, or I’ll put myself in your hands.’ (p. 405)

Phèdre is torn between passion and reason. Her mother and father symbolise two different drives: sexuality and moral judgement. ‘Reason reigns no longer over me… I have lost my self-dominion’ (p. 180-1).

Melchior is offered an ambiguous choice at the end of Spring Awakening; in choosing the Masked Man, perhaps he makes the opposite choice to the ones made by the protagonists at the ends of both Hedda Gabler and Yerma.

Unseen forces Do dramatic characters have agency, or

are they driven by unseen forces? Conflict between gods in classical tragedy; Revenge / classical gods / Christian God in The

Spanish Tragedy; God-as-audience and power of prophecy vs.

freedom to ‘overcome the stars’ (p. 36) in Life Is A Dream;

Gods and guilt in Phèdre: ‘Heaven lit in my heart an ill-omened fire’ (p. 213); ‘I know my baseness, and do not belong / To those

bold wretches who with brazen front / Can revel in their crimes unblushingly.’ (p. 184).

Determinism and entrapment: society, heredity, physiology and psychology in Naturalism and beyond.

Rejections of ‘dramatic theatre’

Brecht:We ask you expressly to discover That what happens all the time is not natural.For to say that something is natural In such times of bloody confusion Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrarinessOf inhuman humanity is to Regard it as unchangeable. (The Exception and the

Rule, p. 37)

‘For art to be “un-political” means only to ally itself with the “ruling” group.’ (Brecht on Theatre, p. 196).

Rejections of ‘dramatic theatre’

HAMM: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something?

CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something!

(Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!

HAMM: I wonder. (Pause.) Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. (Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they’re at! (Beckett, p. 108)

Rejections of ‘dramatic theatre’

SKRIKER. … May day, she cries, may pole axed me to help her. So I spin the sheaves shoves shivers into golden guild and geld and if she can’t guessing game and safety match my name then I’ll take her no miss no me no. Is it William Gwylliam Guillaume? Is it John Jack the ladder in your stocking is it Joke? Is it Alexander Sandro Andrew Drewsteignton? Mephistopheles Toffeenose Tiffany’s Timpany Timothy Mossycoat? No ’t ain’t, says I, no tainted meat me after the show me what you’ve got. (Churchill, p. 9)

Rejections of ‘dramatic theatre’

Mary Luckhurst: ‘Attempts on her Life … matches Beckett in its

interrogation of theatre as a practice, and drives Brechtian concepts of alienation to an extreme.’ (2003: 59)

Interestingly, Martin Crimp once named Caryl Churchill as his favourite living playwright – in part, for her recognition of the ‘playfulness of play’ (‘The Playwright’s Playwright, Guardian, 21 September 1998).

Post-structuralism

Whereas the Structuralist understanding of the relationship between signifier and signified is something like this:

“COFFEE”

Signifier

Signified

Points to

Post-structuralism

…the Post-structuralist understanding is more like this:

“COFFEE”

Signifier

Other signifiers

Points to Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Other signifiers

Jacques Derrida called this the “supplementary” nature of language: each sign depends for its existence on its place in a system of other signs; each sign therefore

bears traces of all the other signs within that system.

Post-structuralism

Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967: “From the moment that there is

meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.”

“There is nothing outside the text.” (Of course, Derrida did not write this at

all: he wrote “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”)

Readerly and writerly texts

Roland Barthes argued that if cultural signs are always ideologically ‘contaminated’, then the most interesting and radical cultural texts are likely to draw attention to their own sign-systems, rather than take them for granted.

Barthes’s favourite texts are more interested in signifiers than signifieds: A ‘readerly’ text is ‘like a cupboard where

meanings are shelved, stacked, safeguarded’ (1974: 200-1);

A ‘writerly’ text will encourage its reader to become an active participant in the creation of its meaning – ‘no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’ (1974: 4).

Martin Crimp (1956-)1956: Born in Dartford, Kent.1975-8: Read English at St. Catherine’s College,

Cambridge.1978: Moved to London, where he worked (among other

jobs) in market research.1981: Joined writers group at Orange Tree Theatre,

Richmond.

1983: Living Remains (a Beckett-inspired piece about a woman trapped in a cubicle).

1988: Became writer-in-residence at the Orange Tree.1990: No One Sees the Video staged at the Royal Court

Theatre (‘a post-consumer play’ about market research and ‘the equation of consumption with happiness’).

1993: The Treatment staged at the Royal Court (a play about a woman called Anne whose story is exploited by two film executives). Wins John Whiting Award.

1997: Attempts on Her Life staged at the Royal Court…

Crimp’s mistrust of narrative

“Whatever I say to you,” he tells me, nervously trawling his fingers through his hair, “you will go away and make a shape from it. That shape will be definitive in the way that the relationship between you and I can never be. […] You will undertake a shaping process … in which I as a person will be misrepresented. It’s inevitable.” (O’Mahony 1993)

Crimp described his earlier play The Treatment as being about ‘what art has to do to life to make a shape out of it’ (Clapp 1997).

‘Attempts on Her Life’: Suicide? Assassination? Narration?

Narrative in Attempts on Her Life

Unseen forces in Attempts on Her Life?

David Edgar: ‘Crimp’s purpose is not only to question

whether we can truly know another human being, but whether we can regard other people as existing at all independent of the models we construct of them. And he does this not by a bald statement, but by playing an elaborate and sophisticated game with the audience’s expectations of how scenes connect within a narrative.’ (1999: 31)

Narrative in Attempts on Her Life

Crimp shows narratives in the process of being constructed (often collaboratively): The second answerphone message shows a

fictional narrative being invented (we later hear the full narrative in scenario 3, and perhaps its continuation in scenario 12)

Scenarios 2 and 3 depict what sound like film executives inventing narratives; scenario 6 (‘Mum and Dad’) uses similar language

Scenario 15, ‘The Statement’, explores anxieties over legal narratives: ‘Well, don’t you consider it accurate?’ (p. 268)

Narrative in Attempts on Her Life

Often, the play’s narratives unravel and deconstruct themselves: Anne’s lover treats her face like both a

‘precious chalice’ and a ‘rugby football’ (p. 213)

After an in-depth description of her ashtray, a narrator adds the following information almost as an afterthought:

‘…she speaks five languages and with the aid of the new CERN accelerator in Geneva she has discovered a new elementary particle which will bear her name and completely change the way we look at the universe.’ (p. 240)

Scenario 13 narrates Annie as a conduit for an alien invasion.

Narrative in Attempts on Her Life

Scenario 10, ‘Kinda Funny’ is a monologue. It is the most conventional narrative in

the play for this reason, but it deconstructs itself through its internal incongruity: after constructing a narrative of optimistic self-determination (the American dream?) it reveals Annie as a fascist.

Scenario 12, ‘Strangely!’, continues scenario 3. It is a much more overtly deconstructed

narrative, using strategies similar to Churchill.

Anne’s inconsistency

Her name Her age ‘…all the things that Anne can be’ (p. 223) ‘She’s a pornographic movie star / A killer

and a brand of car’ (p. 263) Scenario 9, ‘The Threat of International

Terrorism™’, gives us a refrain: ‘Is this really the same little Anne…?’ Once again, Anne becomes ludicrously

inconsistent (p. 244).

‘Tragedy’ in Attempts on Her Life

Scenario 2 is titled ‘Tragedy of Love and Ideology’: The word ‘naturally’ recurs throughout (compare

Brecht) The young woman’s lack of control is fetishised by the

writers of the imagined screenplay. Scenario 3, ‘Faith in Ourselves’, narrates a

woman who ‘breaks down and scratches her cheeks like something from an ancient tragedy’ (p. 218): This description is then disputed by another co-

narrator, who wants something much less classical (but no less artificial).

‘So it’s a universal thing obviously.’ (p. 219) According to one speaker, this horrific story ‘strangely

restores – I think it does – yes – our faith in ourselves.’ (p. 220)

‘Tragedy’ in Attempts on Her Life

Luckhurst compares scenario 16 (‘Pornó’) with Ibsen, esepcially in relation to Crimp’s use of ‘passionate gypsy violin music’ (p. 274): ‘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…. 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, 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.’ (2003: 59)

Postdramatic theatre The absence of dramatic characters means there

is no ‘agon’ in the traditional sense – but we do hear conflict in the simultaneous construction of competing narratives.

The absence of plot allows Crimp to avoid making any assertions about causality (though he certainly plays with ideas about what has ‘caused’ Anne’s reported actions).

Though the play is not structured according to Aristotelian principles, there is still a distinct shape to it, as Aleks Sierz observes: ‘Above all, the play’s daring form is symmetrical: two

scenarios, both played in a foreign language with a translation, occur near the beginning and the end of the play; and there are two rhymed scenes, ‘The Camera Loves You’ and ‘Girl Next Door’. Two scenarios, ‘Faith in Ourselves’ and ‘Strangely!’ are episodes from the same story.’ (2006: 50)

The media and the hyperreal

The media and the hyperreal

The play’s epigraph is from postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard: ‘No one will have directly experienced

the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them.’ (p. 198)

Baudrillard: ‘The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already always reproduced: The hyperreal’. (1992: 186)

The media and the hyperreal

Anne is constantly ‘mediated’: through answerphone messages, photographs, video, screenplays, a TV advertisement, an art installation.

The most dominant voices in the play are those of spin doctors, advertisers and film executives: one scenario is explicitly a screenplay (‘Later. Night. … Dialogue.’), another a commercial for a car.

The play explores the role of empathy in an age when so many narratives either advertise commercial products, or are products themselves: ‘We need to empathise / We need to advertise’ (p. 223) ‘…why can’t she be more attractive? Why can’t she be

more sympathetic?’ (p. 259)

The media and the hyperreal

As Baudrillard has suggested, this has implications for the construction of ‘reality’ itself: ‘“I feel like a screen.” … “Like a TV

screen,” she says, “where everything from the front looks real and alive, but round the back there’s just dust and a few wires.” … She says she’s not a real character, not a real character like you get in a book or on TV, but a lack of character, an absence she calls it, doesn’t she, of character.’ (p. 229)

Meta-critique?

What is the play’s attitude towards ‘truth’?

Scenario 11, ‘Untitled (100 Words)’, is often misinterpreted as Crimp’s explanation of how to read his play: ‘With respect to you I think she’d 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.’ (p. 250-1)

Meta-critique? The scenario is, surely, a parody:

The words used to describe the ‘landmark work’ are empty clichés: ‘It’s moving. It’s timely. It’s distressing. It’s funny. It’s sick. It’s sexy. It’s deeply serious. It’s entertaining. It’s illuminating. It’s dark. It’s highly personal and at the same time raises vital questions about the world we’re living in.’ (p. 250)

When one of the critics asserts that ‘what we see here is the work of a girl who quite clearly should’ve been admitted not to an art school but to a psychiatric unit’ (p. 251-2), Crimp is alluding fairly directly to Charles Spencer’s review of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love: ‘It’s not a theatre critic that’s required here, it’s a psychiatrist.’ (Daily Telegraph, 21 May 1996).

Meta-critique? Are we meant to agree on the critic’s

definition of our own context? ‘… the context of a post-radical, of a post-

human world where the gestures of radicalism take on new meaning in a society where the radical gesture is simply one more form of entertainment i.e. one more product – in this case an artwork – to be consumed.’ (p. 256)

Paul Taylor seemed to think so, asking: ‘Is it, for all its extraordinary flights of eloquent writing, a play that is just cleverly knowing and darkly comic about its own ingenious futility?’ (Independent, 14 March 1997)

Compare Beckett?

Meta-critique?

Crimp, argues Heiner Zimmermann, is ‘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. … In short, it exposes the perversion of current discourses while openly admitting that it has no alternatives to offer.’ (2003: 84)

Crimp has indeed described himself as ‘anti-ideological’ (Clapp 1997).

Meta-critique?

Crimp’s prose piece ‘Four Unwelcome Thoughts’ suggests something a little more complex: ‘The writer… begins to make a mental

list of what is now impossible: the painted portrait (obviously), the well-made play (hilarious), the radical (oh really?) gesture, political engagement (ha ha ha!). The more examples of impossibility and failure he comes up with, the happier he is.’ (2005: x)

References Barthes, R. (1974) S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller,

New York: Hill & Wang. Baudrillard, Jean (1992) ‘Simulations’, trans. Paul

Beitchman, in Patricia Waugh, Postmodernism, London: Edward Arnold.

Clapp, Susannah (1997) ‘No plot, no characters, no rules: Martin Crimp takes the play apart’, New Statesman, 21 March.

Crimp, Martin (2005) Plays 2, London: Faber & Faber. Edgar, David (1999) State of Play: Playwrights on

Playwriting, London: Faber & Faber. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre,

Abingdon: Routledge. Luckhurst, Mary (2003) ‘Political Point-Scoring: Martin

Crimp’s Attempts on her Life’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13:1, 47-60.

O’Mahony, John (1993) ‘Writers’ Crimp’, Guardian, 20 April.

Sierz, Aleks (2006) The Theatre of Martin Crimp, London: A & C Black.

Zimmermann, Heiner (2003) ‘Images of Woman in Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life’, European Journal of English Studies, 7:1, 69-85.