Attempts on Her Life

According to Aleks Sierz (Theatre of Martin Crimp) 'it's no exaggeration to say that his 1997 masterpiece, Attempts on Her Life, is one of the very best plays of the past quarter-century.'

Michael Billington described it as  'a prose-poem that implies our notion of the individual ego is being steadily eroded by a mixture of rampant consumerism, global capitalism and technological advance’ and  'a work which implies virtually everything in modern society conspires to reduce our sense of self.'

In its 17 scenarios for the theatre, an irreverent postmodern chorus of voices deconstructs European Everywoman Ann/Anne/Anya/Annie/Anny/Annushka, who may or may not exist, even within the fiction of the play – she’s a central enigma, a lover, an actress, an artist, a porn star, a suicide, a terrorist, even a brand of car.

The text of the play is prefaced with a quote from Baudrillard:

‘No one will have directly experienced the actual cause of such happenings but everyone will have received an image of them’

and this is a brilliant description of both how the play works and also the experience of audiences/participants at Jersey Arts Centre youtheatre’s production at Grand Jersey this week.

The text is all refraction and resonance: answerphone messages, marketing-speak, translations, descriptions of photographs and exhibition materials – an assemblage of postmodern ennui, ideology, parody and angst, by turns romantic, sophisticated, callous, sinister, cynical, ironic, acid sharp, playfully funny, gossipy, sentimental or self-deceiving - a second-hand barrage of fiction, perceptions and insights, bizarre and mundane, with product placements, hearsay, a skit, a poem, a rap…

The play could be described as all chorus and no action – so it was an inspired decision to locate the Jersey Arts Centre production in the Park Suites at Grand Jersey, a luxurious assortment of conference rooms (including a private cinema) with inspirational and motivational quotes on the walls. 

From the moment we were greeted with canapés and drinks in the lounge (director Daniel Austin is always solicitous of audiences comfort!), then led by youtheatre members (very sophisticated in black cocktail dresses and suits) through a seeming-labyrinth of business suites, to be confided in, lectured to, whispered and shouted at, until the final scenario holding hands with the actors in a circle on the hotel terrace (at night, in front of a busy road, and no doubt to the bemusement of some hotel guests!) the audience was truly embedded in the world of the play, so that it became a site-sensitive work.

Yet the cast remained true to the text with its overlapping voices, silences, poetic rhythm (the beautiful 100 words) and languages (in this case Roumanian and French) with just the addition of  a few props; a dinging bell between scenes, classical music played on a laptop, black blindfolds for scenario 12 STRANGELY!

It’s an ensemble piece and one of the strengths of the Jersey Arts Centre youtheatre has always been its ensemble work, and in this they excelled again to produce a very mature piece of theatre.   I can’t unpick this to do justice to all of the actors who worked together so professionally, but I did find Fleur very powerfully moving in scenario 3 Faith in Ourselves, and Hermione, tipsily giddy with self-love in scenario 5 The Camera Loves You, was a comic scene stealer.

I already admired Martin Crimp’s text, so this opportunity to experience the play was a real treat – I noticed how subliminal meanings were exposed through being stated explicitly - the racism coming out of the marketing spiel about the Anny car in scenario 7 which makes you flinch; or through being exaggerated - the hype about the Porno Anne who could change the world, end animal suffering, end human suffering, popularise psychoanalytical theory, dance with the particles of light etc.. 

It’s an early 'Attempt' at a new type of theatre to penetrate and exploit the media saturation we take for granted, which makes us blasé and almost unreachable because even atrocities are pre-packaged for us;  an 'Attempt' at describing our experience of the world through language, while simultaneously exposing the fallacies of this.  It seems to parody itself in the critics scene:

‘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.’

The work cheats us of a conclusion – it slyly trails off in the last scenario, with a whimper rather than a bang – it has to really, and our audience was left appropriately wondering if the play had really ended, following the cast as they strode back into the hotel, ignoring us.

But as in the Baudrillard quote, all those words left after-images in my mind of things which I hadn’t actually seen – photographs reducing to just little dots, Anne’s red bag filled with stones, the child in two bags…

And the refrain of it is still stuck in my head the next day like some catchy pop tune:

She’s the girl next door
She’s the fatal flaw…

The camera loves you

THE CAMERA LOVES YOU

Wonderful!

Games

And babies, iconic anti-Vietnam War poster

James Saunders’ 1970s play Games consists of eight sections and a company of four rehearsing a piece based around a Reuter report on the US court-martial of a soldier for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, March 16 1968.

It moves from disconnected words and phrases which gradually coalesce into sense as the performers march on the spot like soldiers, through an actor and his director rehearsing a scene:

‘Why did you shoot them?’

‘Because they was Vietcong.’

‘Where was the babies?’

‘They was in their mothers' arms.’  

to rebellions and disruptions by the actors:

‘We talk about theatre.  Outside there’s a war going on and we talk about theatre.’

But each time the disruptions might seem real, the play reins them in and they become another layer of the performance, another game.  It is a clever way of challenging an audience’s levels of acceptance of the conventions and pretence of theatre. 

The piece also touches on how news itself is used as a commodity:

‘It’s beautiful.

Really extraordinary…

…it’s absolutely true.  It’s a Reuter report, a straight Reuter report.’

Daniel Austin’s recent powerful production with Jersey Arts Centre youtheatre emphasized this aspect by having the four actors seated like newsreaders at tables, with images projected onto a screen behind them.

Starting with old footage of the Apollo moon landings and the performers quietly reading interwoven, gently-rhythmic extracts from the screenplay of Platoon, a Native American poem, and pieces on the rules of warfare and on acting, the scenes were also intercut with:

• a live BBC newsfeed, (the content fed by chance was on the Delhi Commonwealth Games and concerns about safety)
• The iconic Russian roulette scene from the 1978 film The Deer Hunter.  Under 18s were asked to leave the auditorium to comply with the film licence and all of the actors retired to the green room.  (Watching the film in this context one was really conscious of it as performance.)
• A very moving montage of images of the My Lai massacre, (a sense of the victims was absent from the original script, rooted as it was in a point in time.)
• Breaks when the cast elicited responses and questions from the audience.
• As an added layer, a young actor appeared as Daniel Austin, the third director of Jersey Arts Centre.  At the end of the performance he was left alone in a fading square of light, allowing us to conjure up a sense of George Ritchie, the first director of Jersey Arts Centre, who was not there but to whom the performance was dedicated.

The production was beautiful, evocative and uplifting and yet also provocative and unsettling, raising questions for me such as:

• What is a true response to news/theatre? 
• To what extent do we fake our responses?  That we all perform...
• How much do we really want to care?  
• How we want to consume news in five minute bites with the blood, pain and violence to some degree neutralised, so that we can continue our daily lives, not too moved or affected...
• Just in using images of the My Lai victims, as I have done in this blog, there is an element of guilt.  The commodification of tragedy. 
• And the ethics of war photography, of detachment, of 'capturing' the iconic image instead of helping individual victims.
• The ethics of any cultural usage.   

My Lai and Games

South Vietnam - 16 March 1968, in what became known as the My Lai massacre, a unit of the US army killed hundreds (estimate 347-504) of unarmed and unresisting civilians, the majority of whom were women, children (including babies) and old men.

‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ (Shakespeare - King Lear)  What turned some soldiers of Charlie Company, described as a normal cross-section of American youth, with an average age of 20, into babykillers? One GI’s mother said “I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”

In Games (1971) by James Saunders, a company of four rehearse a piece of experimental theatre based on a Reuter report of the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley for his actions at My Lai.

In a note to the text, James Saunders explained: ‘Games is about freedom, responsibility and choice, treated not as theoretical concepts but as aspects of an actual event which takes place during rehearsals and during each performance.  The play is about the fact of its being put on; but this fact concerns not only the actors who have chosen to do it, but the audience – which is both an audience and a collection of individuals – who choose to accept or reject it, to let it proceed smoothly or to interrupt it or to wreck it.  But it is not enough to present an audience with the fact of a choice; the possibility of using it must be put within their limits.  Gauging these limits so as to try to avoid the two extremes of frozen acceptance or an untheatrical chaos means that there is no such thing as a definitive performance.’
 
The play deliberately sets up a conflict between the unreality and game playing of theatre versus the carnage of what was a contemporaneous war.  It is a witty indictment of theatre and a critique of the compassion fatigue of audiences – or is it?  Does it, through the medium of theatre, challenge us to break through our apathy by contrasting our passive obeying of the conventions of theatre with that of soldiers obeying orders? Make us consider the ethics of theatre, of cultural voyeurism, of appropriating the stories of others, as well as the ethics of war? By employing theatrical techniques such as agitprop, irony, parody and verbatim theatre can it provoke some sense of social responsibility?
 
American journalist Jonathan Schell commented: ‘The massacre calls for self-examination and for action, but if we deny the call and try to go on as before, as though nothing had happened, our knowledge, which can never leave us once we have acquired it, will bring about an unnoticed but crucial alteration in us, numbing our most precious faculties and withering our souls. For if we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept.’
 
Jersey Arts Centre youtheatre will perform Games on Wednesday 22 September as part of An Audience for George Ritchie.

An Audience for George Ritchie

An Audience for George Ritchie is a fundraising event at Jersey Arts Centre on Wednesday 22 September comprising a performance of James Saunders' Games by the ever-inventive Jersey Arts Centre youtheatre followed by a concert by Le Rocquier Big Band for the second half.

George Ritchie was Jersey Arts Centre's first director when it opened its doors in 1983.  In 1984 he directed a production of Lorca's Blood Wedding in the chapel at Trinity Manor in which I had a small part.  It was my last public performance (happily!) but it was a wonderful experience and helped inspire a strong attachment to the newly blooming arts centre in St Helier.

Jersey owes a great debt of gratitude to its Arts Centre directors who have ensured that it is cut-off only by water and not by ideas or inspiration.  They have brought world class performers and artists to the islands and, as importantly, helped to encourage, nurture and develop creative talents and to stimulate debate.  Long may it continue!