Attempts on her Life. Silk Street Theatre.

Martin Crimp’s influential postmodernist piece Attempts on Her Life was first seen at the Royal Court back in 1997 and had a revival, to mixed reviews, at the National Theatre in 2007. Since then, the work, which revolves around establishing the identity of an elusive and mercurial figure called Anne, has become something of a favourite with universities and drama schools.

It is easy to see Attempts on Her Life’s attraction for students. The work is anti-narrative, anti-character, and largely anti-structure, and the written text leaves the allocation of dialogue and most of the staging decisions up to director and cast. Some productions have a cast of 20. The National Theatre’s had 11. Others have as few as 6. This is a work that invites, indeed demands the kind of carte blanche experimentation and exploration undergraduates and postgraduates thrive at. Unfortunately, despite quality performances from an ensemble here of 8, director Emma Baggott’s current revival at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama feels surprisingly cautious, tentative even, in its approach to the work.

Attempts on Her Life opens with the body of Anne, possibly a victim of suicide, lying supine on a hospital trolley awaiting post-mortem examination by medics. Clad in a skimpy red dress, she may be dead, but she manages to mouth the lyrics of Eartha Kitt’s Want To Be Evil all the same. Is she really evil, or is she someone to whom evil is done? The medics’ task, and by extension the audience’s job too, is to come to understand who this figure is.

What follows are 17 scenarios with almost no connecting narrative structure, and which provide commentary without any kind of internal storyline. Each offers a different perspective that both constructs and deconstructs the nature of the character in question. One suggests Anne, also called Annie and Anya, at various points, is a terrorist. Another sees her as an artist, the assessment of whose work by malign critics offers the nearest thing in the piece to a light comic moment. In another scenario she is a car called Anny that whisks magically over pristine white beaches but has “no room for Gypsies, Arabs, Jews, Turks, Kurds, blacks, or any of that human scum”. In others she is variously a porn star, the lifeless daughter of a refugee escaping Ukraine, a right-wing off-grid American doomsday prepper, a voracious sexual athlete intentionally trying to get infected with HIV, and a gap-year student with a backpack full of stones. We almost never hear from Anne herself, and where we do her words are cryptic. The character herself is played gender-blind by different ensemble actors in each scenario. This is a discussion of a life by people who know about Anne without ever having truly known her.

It is challenging to pin down any single meaning to Attempts on Her Life. At one level it is a comment on the idea that a unified, coherent, individual identity is a myth. On another level it explores the multiple possibilities, good and bad, that life affords those various Annes now emerging in different countries, cultures, and social classes. At its core Crimp’s work is an attack on the way in which definitions themselves serve to limit and restrict the way we see the world around us. Like Anne herself, this work can be seen in multiple ways.

Peter Butler’s set utilises cameras positioned above and at each end of the transverse stage, the video feed from which is projected above the action. We see Anne simultaneously on stage and on screen, with each situation presented from a different angle. It is a conceit that makes its point about how media contributes to creating alternative truths, but it is a tad busy at times. It is hard to know where to look.

The ensemble of final year students are uniformly on point. What feels absent from Baggott’s production is a sufficient variety of tone. She finds tragedy in some scenarios and humour in others, but both dramatic elements feel woefully under-developed. The tone is cautious, verging on reverentially earnest. The resulting lack of light and shade leaves it hard to work out where one scenario finishes, and another begins. Occasionally it feels repetitive.

The show closes to the sound of Kae Tempest’s haunting prose-poem Grace. It is a song that revolves around love – for oneself and for others – and it feels a strange choice here. Whoever, or whatever, Anne is, there is no sense she has ever been loved. She is too ethereal and unknowable a figure for that.

Writer: Martin Crimp

Director: Emma Baggott