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

Martin Crimp’s influential 1997 play Attempts on her Life has been given a major new production at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, under the direction of Katie Mitchell. Did critics welcome its return?

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Matt Wolf in his Theatre.com Review: “Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life on the vast Lyttelton stage [is] 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…The production in every way marks the culmination of Crimp and Mitchell's ongoing journey to date…What's perpetually enthralling about the piece is its sense of a boundary-pushing we get these days more often in dance...Sure, the script exists to deconstruct itself…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.”

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: “When Martin Crimp's play was first staged ten years ago…Crimp surely meant to define the planet as a Tower of Babel or Bedlam—and who can quarrel with that in 2007? Whether this justifies the bold, busy—at times overbusy—revival it now gets from Katie Mitchell I'm not wholly sure. The 11-person cast take a zillion roles each. The sounds vary from police sirens to helicopters to explosions to a Beethoven sonata played by an actor. Cameras fill a stark Lyttelton stage and duplicate almost every encounter in close-up on massive screens. If you doubted that you belonged to a narcissistic, voyeuristic society, well, you won't leave the National with any doubt…One of the National's functions is to take risks and embrace the odd and outre. And Claudie Blakley, Kate Duchene, Zubin Varla and the rest of Mitchell's cast kept me absorbed and alert.”

Michael Billington of The Guardian: “In denying the idea of fixed identity or linear narrative, [the play] speaks to the modern age. But, much as I admire Crimp's text, I'm not sure it is helped by Katie Mitchell's hi-tech revival…The virtue of Crimp's play is that it offers carte blanche to its director. But Mitchell's version...focuses too exclusively on media-manipulation at the expense of the play's political purpose...it too often turns the play into a self-conscious media satire.”

A scene from Attempts on her Life

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “Martin Crimp is a big cheese in Europe, where experimental theatre enjoys more kudos… As a picture of the Zeitgeist…both the play and Mitchell's production work well. Everything is edgy, dark, uncertain. There is particularly good stuff on the pseudy inanities of arts programmes, while Crimp's apprehension of a climate of terror and random violence seems prophetic, post-September 11. Mitchell's constant use of video also suggests an age in which we observe the world through the glass of our TV and computer screens, darkly. But it's not enough. Theatre needs to do more than intrigue: it needs to move and involve us, and those are qualities beyond Crimp's grasp…”

Alice Jones of The Independent: “ Martin Crimp’s play eschews easy interpretations...presenting ‘17 scenarios for the theatre’ in which contradictory accounts are given of a central character who never appears...Katie Mitchell takes up the challenge of Crimp’s script. An ‘open text’, it refuses to assign lines to specific characters and notes only that it should be played by ‘a company of actors’...Crimp’s clever-clever writing is often submerged in the whirl of camera-work and pastiches of the X Files and Nineties music which make up Mitchell’s vision…At times this piece about the spiritual vacuum at the heart of Nineties, and now Noughties society, felt just like an art installation—slick, chilly and a little shallow. But, then again, perhaps that was the point.”

Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: “Miss Mitchell, until recently one of the finest directors of her generation, distracts from what is said and done, with frantic on-stage activity as her performers double as scene-setters and musicians and work several video cameras. She refines the weird style of her Cottesloe Theatre adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, in which the narrative was acted on stage and filmed for simultaneous viewing on screens.The temptation was to see how the stage and film images differed. So, too, here. Miss Mitchell keeps nudging us to observe her flamboyant creative process…”

[AD]Simon Edge of The Daily Express: “There is no interval because they know that half of us would leave…So a play lambasting the video packaging of society relies on precisely the same technique…A scene satirising highbrow TV impersonations of Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin raises a welcome laugh but making them talk psychobabble is a cheap shot. It means that society is damned both for dumbing down and dumbing up. This is not serious comment. It is…yah-boo-sucks nihilism…In the final scene, someone in the wings presses a button that makes the entire cast disappear through the floor. I couldn’t help wishing they had pressed it a lot sooner.”

Quentin Letts of The Daily Mail: “People used to say the British would not tolerate totalitarianism. We were too bloody-minded, individualist and sensible. Given how an audience put up with two hours of debasing trash at the National Theatre last night, that may no longer be the case. Any society which can endure such fare without shouting ‘rot’ and angrily demanding a refund is a society in severe decay, a society which will take force-feeding like a tethered French duck…The management asks me to state that this production is part of the Travelex season of £10 tickets. That means you pay the theatre £10—not vice versa as it should be.”