Zubin Varla, Dina Korzun, Sandra Voe in Attempts on her Life

Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre may well be remembered as, amongst other things, the regime that made a directorial star out of Katie Mitchell, the erstwhile iconoclast of small spaces like the Gate and the Pit who in recent years has gone for larger arenas big time. But even her track record to date can't quite prepare one for the exhilaration that comes with seeing Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life on the vast Lyttelton stage in the kind of programming decision that makes you glad to be in England. (Were a comparable venture tried at a major New York not-for-profit address, heads would doubtless roll—if, that is, they weren't lost in the stampede of people walking out.) I'm the first to acknowledge that Crimp's wilfully fractured, fractious play may infuriate those who like their theatre cosy, codified and cut and dried. But you'd have to have had no exposure whatsoever to what Konstantin in Crimp's translation of The Seagull refers to as "new forms" to be entirely adrift. The production in every way marks the culmination of Crimp and Mitchell's ongoing journey to date, and I, for one, would not have missed it for the world.

Does every moment of its nearly two hours (no interval) make total sense? No, and those wanting absolute narrative cohesion from their art should read no further. But what's astonishing about a production that amounts to an epic expansion on Tim Albery's 1997 Royal Court studio-sized approach to this same play is how propulsive Mitchell and her company's stagecraft makes a deliberately obscure play—a text whose punning title suggests both a work in progress (the word "attempts") as well as the more obvious meaning of a woman whose life is at risk. That person is the shape-shifting Anne/Annie/Anya, who in various of the play's 16 scenes (the opening one, for some reason, has been cut for this production) is alternately a terrorist/restless world traveller/self-harming artist/prostitute—even a car-turned-global phenomenon. "She could be any one of us," says Sandra Voe, who is one of a tightly knit, entirely black-clad ensemble, several of whom appeared earlier this season in Mitchell's National production of Waves. Think of her, then, as a kind of EveryAnne or a Rorschach test on whom the audience can project whatever meaning it likes. As the play wastes no time telling us, "the search for a point is pointless"—which is only part of Crimp's point.

A scene from Attempts on her Life

In fact, Mitchell's agitated, restless staging tallies exactly with a time in which every third person seems to be afflicted by Attention Deficit Disorder. The opening line-up of the ensemble is masterful in its shared jitteriness—an impulse toward movement that makes it not at all surprising when the cast later breaks into some highly accomplished choreography. The extensive use of video confirms one's sense that Mitchell is the closest this country has to the maverick work of the Wooster Group in New York—with the important difference that Mitchell is given access to a premier stage in arguably the defining English-speaking theatrical address in the world today, whereas the Wooster group denizens (whom this company's Kate Duchene markedly resembles) continue to ply their wares in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, well away from the mainstream.

[AD]And what a company! None of Zubin Varla's forays into musicals (he was in the Gale Edwards Jesus Christ Superstar) gave any indication of his piano and violin-playing skills, and one only wishes a purposefully busy, buzzy sound design eased off at times to give Varla's occasional vocals their due. He's very funny, too, perpetually crawling back to take his bespectacled seat at a satiric Late Review featuring this production's own version of Tom Paulin and, inevitably, Germaine Greer. Paul Ready clutches a skull at one point, Hamlet-style, later appearing on film in pore-examining close-up to tell us in a not bad rural American accent of yet another of the myriad incarnations of Anne. There are scenes of injections that may give the squeamish pause, and some of the riffs on the relationship between performance and reality ("we need to feel what we're seeing is real; it isn't just acting") have a been there/done that feel: didn't Shakespeare get there first? But what's perpetually enthralling about the piece is its sense of a boundary-pushing we get these days more often in dance (a genre whose critics, too, can be less conservative than their theatre equivalents). Sure, the script exists to deconstruct itself as much as Anne; that much is to be expected from a text containing numerous pre-emptive strikes against virtually any objection one might care to make. And yet, the language—snatches of Russian and Japanese included—never for a second exists apart from Mitchell and designer Vicki Mortimer's setting for it. It's as if everyone involved has taken to heart a passing mention of "theatre for a world in which theatre has died" and has shaken the form unforgivingly and in my view unforgettably back into life.

Attempts on her Life
By Martin Crimp
Directed by Katie Mitchell
National Theatre/Lyttelton