Attempts On Her Life, Lyttelton, NT, London
Platonov, Barbican, London
Someone Else's Shoes, Soho Theatre. London
Anny, are you okay?
Sunday, 18 March 2007
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Where to start? We appear to be in some vast sepulchral recording studio at the beginning of Attempts On Her Life. The Lyttelton stage, stripped back to its fly ropes and concrete walls, stretches away into the darkness. Electric cables snake across the floor amid a forest of cameras on glinting tripods, waiting to roll.
This is Katie Mitchell's new, riveting, experimental take on Martin Crimp's radically fragmented anti-play. There is no story in the traditional sense, scarcely any straight dialogue and as for the central character, Anne - the "her" of the title - she is an elusive, kaleidoscopic myriad of possibilities. She is spoken of and maybe also embodied by a host of actors but you can never be quite sure which, if any of them, is Anne.
Crimp offers a teasing array of alternative "scenarios". It is deconstructionism meets detective murder mystery - or suicide mystery. Sometimes Anne is discussed as if she is the doomed heroine of a movie, still being outlined. At other points, she is pompously discussed by Newsnight Review-style critics as a video artist who has recorded various attempts to take her own life. Or is she a celebrity babe having a mental breakdown under the media spotlight, a happy child turned terrorist, or somebody caught in a horrific war zone? In one darkly comic mock-advert, "the new Anny" even becomes a dream car. The voiceover purrs about how the sun gleams on her aerodynamic body and reassures us (supposedly) that "There is no room in the Anny for the degenerate races ... No one ever packs the Anny with explosives", and so on.
In a bad production, this could come across as sheer bewildering pretentiousness, and even Mitchell can't save an unsatisfactory ending. But her superb ensemble - including Kate Duchêne, Claudie Blakley, Paul Ready and Zubin Varla - mercurially play film industry hacks, journos, porn stars and pop stars with satirical wit, icy callousness, then surfacing fear and despair. This is all while they are filming each other live, appearing both on the stage and on several giant screens.
Though it would take more than one viewing to understand half of what is going on, a disturbing portrait emerges of modern lives being dictated and damaged, manipulated by creative artists and the media with a horrible gulf between glossy ideals and grim realities. Mitchell's staging is fantastically orchestrated, intelligent and haunting. She and her team emerge here as world class avant-gardists. Attempts On Her Life is a fascinating follow-up to Mitchell's multimedia dramatisation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves and an intriguing pairing with Nicholas Wright's The Reporter (currently playing in the Cottesloe), which explores the mysterious suicide of TV presenter James Mossman.
Meanwhile a few staunch traditionalists who were infuriated by Mitchell's recent take on The Seagull - updated to the 1930s, with expressionistic jolts and tangos - might equally take umbrage at the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg reworking Chekhov's early drama, Platonov. Director Lev Dodin has the playwright's frustrated provincial characters - not least the philanderer Platonov - hurling themselves off jetties into a glimmering pool of green water where they blare jazz trumpets and make adulterous love like a swirling dance. There are one or two weak links in the cast and surtitles inevitably reduce your emotional involvement, but this is a visually bewitching, inspired production. It is also beautifully orchestrated as everyone lingers on the tiered jetties, viewing each other's failing love affairs with mocking cruelty and suicidal grief.
In Someone Else's Shoes, by Drew Pautz, a young woman called Mary (Denise Gough) has become an anti-capitalist terrorist, targeting the flagship store of a global corporation which sells heavily branded training shoes. She says shoplifting their goods is her guerrilla protest. She also has a homemade bomb. Mary is laced into a schematic plot. She seduces the shop assistant, Jed (Jonjo O'Neill), but he is torn. On the one hand, he is being rapidly promoted by the big boss, Richard Amedeo. On the other hand, Richard's swanky brother, Adam Amedeo, has stolen Jed's long-term girlfriend, Nadine. She is a conceptual artist seemingly prepared to sell out when Adam, an art collector, wants to buy her wholesale.
Someone Else's Shoes isn't wholly original. Indeed it's rather like Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things crossed with Patrick Marber's Closer. Stephen Unwin's English Touring Theatre production is slick, with speedy scene changes in a white-box set, and Gough and O'Neill are particularly good, growing feverishly crazy. However, others - adopting Canadian accents for the Toronto setting - become vocally monotonous when the snappy repartee requires more varied tempos. Still, it's a smart-talking and witty script of some promise.
'Attempts On Her Life' (020 7452 3000), to 10 May; 'Platonov' (0845 120 7550), ends today; 'Someone Else's Shoes' (0870 429 6883), to 7 April
