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attempts on her life
by Martin Crimp
Directed by Katie Mitchell and the Company
Designed by Vicki Mortimer
Choreographed by Donna Berlin
Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre
South Bank, London SE1
Call +44 (0) 20 7452 3000 Tickets £10 - £27.50
In Repertoire
Running time 2 hours with no intermission
Through May 10
No Easy Way Out
We, who know, are about to show you how shallow, trashy and cynical life was then, and is now. Don’t kid yourself that we won’t. We’re going to give it to you in spades, as we used to say. We will use every shallow, trashy and cynical construct we can think of, including not taking the blame for anything, because we all directed this, and it is important for you to know that it was mutually arrived at because we know we are going to knock your socks off. We’ll start by pretending we are a kind of Greek Chorus, and we’ll overlap our lines a lot, and in the end we are going to disappear into the bowels of the earth, and although that’s because it’s all we could think of, it will look really great, and we won’t look like a lot of oglers. We will give you a big screen to look at as much as you like, with split screen effect, and in fact it will be mixed-up media like it’s never been done before, because it’s the salivating, shallow, trashy, cynical, carrion feeding media that we are going after. We will take lots of time about lots of news interviews and talk shows, but we’ll give you loads of tripods and cameras to look at. We will talk with our backs to the audience, sideways on, lying on our backs, any which way, and this will be dangerous and effective, and we will show you one of the girls’ tits. We are musicians, too, and we will blast your eardrums with illegal levels of live, amplified guitar ‘music’. We ourselves will be miked up, and we will all play multiple characters, and we will lampoon pretentious commentators, and in the process we hope to hit an occasional bulls-eye. We will never be pretentious ourselves, or tiresome, because when we run lists of words over the speakers, words like … deportment, brother, fear, anxiety, to kiss, door, contented, ridicule, to slap, fertile deserts, particles of light, month, nice, woman, etc etc., we can do this because we are in touch with the truth. We will repeat the word ‘strangely’ a dozen times, with reverb, over wailing or a frantic monologue, and we can do this because we can cope with the sordid world the poor bitch who killed herself couldn’t. You probably won’t appreciate the luminous beauty of Dina Korzun’s performance, because it will look as if it is there by accident. There’s no way that the whole thing is really a steroid-and-other-substance-enhanced piece of dated agitprop, masquerading as hard hitting, heart-in-the-right-place theatre, better achieved the way Camden People’s Theatre used to do in half the time and for 100th of the budget, before they grew out of it, but even if it is all that, you will be sucked in because it is The National, after all, and even if you don’t buy in, there is no intermission so it doesn’t matter how tired of it you get, you can’t leave without making a fuss and drawing attention to yourself, and showing your attitude to the sick world around us which, thank Christ, we are here to portray.
Not Recommended
Saul Reichlin
London correspondent
Talk Theatre in Chicago Podcast
www.ChicagoCritic.com
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