iPlay at work

A play for people with short attention spans? Attempts on her Life is a stylistic collage of rock songs and ads, with less structure than an iPod Shuffle. Peter Crawleypreviews the self-consciously modern, hyper-hip drama, which opens at Project tonight

IT doesn't look very promising. Maybe even a little bare. Describing itself as 30 years old, male, and not interested in having kids, the MySpace page for Attempts on Her Life boasts a very slick image, a lovingly constructed pop video/trailer and - at the time of writing - just two friends.

But then you start clicking: through the page's one genuine acquaintance, and then through their friends, and then their friends' friends; until, nearly two hours later maybe, you have clicked across the globe, scanning the profiles, listening habits, the relationship status and, above all, the images of a multitude. The purity of the text, as someone once put it, has given way to the promiscuity of the intertext.

So it is with Attempts on Her Life, Rough Magic's new production of Martin Crimp's playfully fragmented work from 1997, a play that leaps around in time, in space, in language, unfettered by a plot or even actual characters.

Written as a series of dialogues, all of which concern a central character called Anne (or Annie, or Anya, or Anny) who never appears, it has become Crimp's most famous play, and now - perfectly straddling the rise and fall of the Blair years - it is simultaneously being revived in Dublin's Project Cube and London's National Theatre.

"It turns out to be a gift for directors," Crimp once told this paper, and Tom Creed, that gift's latest recipient, might agree. "It was one of those plays where you think you know what it is, and then it reminds you that actually you don't," he says.

Creed, a director in his mid-20s whose work for Rough Magic so far has been aesthetically beautiful, dramatically complex and very, very hip, seems drawn to such wide-open possibilities (his last productions for the company were similarly non-prescriptive works by Jon Fosse and Sarah Kane).

"You read these plays and go, 'Oh this is amazing. I can do anything I want with this'. But actually they are plays. They're not texts for performance art."

Attempts on Her Life, which in Creed's production moves from a sequence with no actors, through monologues, duologues, rock'n'roll songs, a 1930s musical number and a choreographed advertisement, is a stylistic collage, both heavily ironic and acidly funny. It can be hard to fathom, though. The "musicality" of its structure, as Creed sees it, can strike you with the same intractable logic of the iPod Shuffle.

Anne's identity is no less random. The effervescent heroine of a movie pitch? A concerned humanitarian? A suicidal artist? A remorseless terrorist? Or a brand new model of car with electric windows fitted as standard? Anne is in constant flux.

If Creed's production has decided that, instead of a howling absence at its core, there is in fact some truth at the heart of the play, that may be because there is something recognisable in these attempts on a life.

"One of the things it's about," he says, "is the fact that the world makes us present different versions of ourselves to deal with it. Today I'm going to be a terrorist. Today I'm going to be a rock star. It's both, I think, a very well written play and a mad experiment. You see all these things in this order and you have to make sense of it all."

Although the production is promoted as being of searing relevance for the world of today ("a pre-9/11 postmodern classic explodes into our post-9/11 world"), Crimp's piece is firmly rooted in the late-1990s, with its political flippancy, Jean Baudrillard quotations, and ceaseless self-references ("It's theatre for a world in which theatre itself has died") - so rooted, in fact, that it might now seem very much of its time. The pre-9/11 classical postmodern period, perhaps.

"If there isn't an ideology that's being propounded by the play, there's all sorts of things the play is about," Creed says of its playfulness. "It's about fear. In a way the play is a catalogue of fears. It's a fear of terrorism, genocide, poverty, loneliness, what your children are getting up to. It's a fear of whether the packaging of food is telling you the truth. And it's about the strategy we use to deal with our fears."

For a play that refers to "The Threat of International Terrorism™" and seems to end with a plane crash, he adds, its prescience deserves reinvestigation. "Crimp is one of those playwrights who, through his career, has been able to put his finger on the pulse of what makes the world tick."

That may be why the slippery identities and narrative fragmentation of the play - like so many MySpace voyages - seems less radical than regular. When the stories of the multiplexes have become as convoluted as Pulp Fiction, Memento, Syriana or Inland Empire, a play with no precise beginning, middle or end hardly seems incomprehensible.

For his part, Creed doesn't see much difference between the darting progression of Attempts on Her Life and the similarly episodic entertainments of cabaret, itself originally a political form, or the channel-hopping logic of watching television. "It's almost like a play for someone with a short attention span," he says. "Something else is going to be along in the next five minutes."

Nor is the non-appearance of its central character without precedent. Crimp recently mentioned another play, first performed more than 50 years ago, in which a principle character is never seen. "Now nobody really thinks that Godot is going to turn up. But the play works because the characters hold out the possibility that he might. In the same way that this play is about the mysterious Anne, the play is just as much about the people who are onstage trying to make sense of the world."

If that world, mapped out in ultra-stylish images, rock'n'roll numbers, overseas atrocities and dancing car ads appears increasingly senseless, Annie may well be the heroine we require. "I'm not going to say whether or not Anne turns up on stage," says Creed, a little cryptically.

I wouldn't fancy her chances. Anne doesn't even have a MySpace page. Without one, you're nobody.

Attempts on Her Life opens tonight at Project Cube, Dublin and runs until May 5th