18 March 2007
The Battle Commences
In November, Encore saw a major skirmish on the horizon. The battle has broken out, the beef is on and it’s bloody and cruel. On Wednesday, Katie Mitchell’s production of Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life opened at the National Theatre. Warning shots were heard during preview from the ludicrous dullards who try to dominate boards like What’s On Stage where the boorish cries of ‘indulgent theatrical wankery’ and ‘pretentious, insulting nonsense’ have been hurled all week. The show’s own microsite includes one person who called the show self-indulgent crap before it had even opened. The Guardian ran a scandalised piece on Saturday, entitled ‘National Lampoon‘, reporting criticisms of the production’s experimentalism, and claims that it was dividing audiences (as if that’s a bad thing), and that Hytner’s regime was under threat if it continued to support Mitchell. The critics are predictably hostile: Nick de Jongh gave it one solitary star and waspishly accused the production of ‘Mitchellitis - a dreadful form of directorial embellishment’ putting the boot in by pointedly referring to her as ‘until recently one of the finest directors of her generation’; Billington, as usual, thought the production was too arty and not sociological enough (does he only have the one review?); Quentin Letts apparently called it ‘two hours of debasing trash’.
But the defence has been equally passionate. David Eldridge’s fiery and moving appraisal of the production shows insight and sensitivity missing in most reviews. Lance Woodman offered a punchy defence and Andrew Field’s commentary pays it the worthy compliment of a rigorous theatrical and intellectual survey. Some of the critics, to be fair, also praised it. Kate Kellaway in today’s Observer is pretty positive; Coveney is refreshingly open-minded. There have been passionate defences of the play on all the discussion sites.
We all know that people are entitled to their own opinions. No one wants to say that people can’t hold beliefs that we don’t agree with. But opinions aren’t purely personal; they rest on a complex set of observations and beliefs and they can be argued with - and hey, they can be wrong (if they couldn’t be, why would we argue?). People should be permitted to hold absurd aesthetic beliefs just they are permitted to hold aberrant beliefs about the world. Encore would no more seek to prevent someone believing that Pinter is talentless than that the earth is flat. But these are not private beliefs; when veiled threats are made to Nick Hytner over the production, when the level of abuse gets heated and personal, when the comments reveal not merely dislike but hatred, you know that you’re in the middle of a battle for the soul of our theatre.
First, here’s Encore’s view. The production is breathtaking. The design draws on and enhances the technological hardness of the Lyttelton, from the opening’s amplified rumble of the safety curtain disclosing its frightened characters, to the dark gun-metal colour of the surroundings, suggesting a gloom of contemporary violence from which the scenes emerge, to the enormous (20×30ft?) projection screen on which we see images from the stage, organised, composited, turned into products and images, snapshots of suffering and art and suffering and art. Each of Martin Crimp’s 16 scenarios (the first has been cut) is rigorously realised; sometimes this takes the form of pastiche - ‘The Girl Next Door’ becomes a kind of Abba/showtune complete with cheap video; ‘The Statement’ is a 90s cop show interview scene. At others, as in ‘Faith in Ourselves’ we see morally complex, emotionally realised, but spatially unlocatable exchanges about terror and pain and cruelty and Europe that defies resolution either live or on screen. Generally the play has been located in the 1990s, sometimes by wittily lapsing into some momentary obsession of that decade (Late Review, line dancing) tracing the emergence of a new kind of politics, culture and violence; it’s a production steeped in the Bosnian genocide, in New Labour, and in cool Britannia. But this is not nostalgic; it’s tracing a history of the present, the production is asking us how we got where we are now.
The Lyttelton stage is enormous and Encore worried that in the vast exposure of that theatre the linguistic delicacy and continual delicacy and ambiguity might be lost. But Mitchell has found a form that preserves everything that is mysterious, evanescent and richly multiple about the play, but grounds it, as needed, in the monumental architecture of its new home. It’s a deeply robust production with an unshakeable sense of form that unfolds through the evening.
Most of all, though, you’ll be stunned simply that the show is on. That such a rich and experimental and avantgarde show could be on one of the two main stages of the National Theatre. Waves amazed for the same reasn but even that was only in the Cottesloe. Programming this play, with this director, is an enormous statement of faith that the theatre can be art of the highest and most demanding kind, and can still command an audience.
Elsewhere in Encore, we’ve drawn up battle lines between the literalists and the metaphysicals. This is a simplistic division, of course it is, but it captures a key conflict in our contemporary theatre, even if some people and some shows seem to range across these territories. But Attempts on Her Life at the National Theatre reminds us of the utility of such divisions. It’s all metaphysical and it’s wholly magnificent.
Am I contradicting myself? Can a play both be about the present tense, how we got to be where are, and also withdraw from literal meaning? Yes, yes and yes. Art of this kind, in its complex and demanding form, makes us ask some of the most fundamental questions - philosophical, political, ethical - about the conditions of our existence, who we are, where the value of our lives come from, the nature of our mutual obligations, the most fundamental form of our rights. They do so by presenting us with abstracted encounters with inhumanity that test the stability of our settled judgments.
During the first weeks of Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Court, one of its mythical subjects, Syd Barrett, obligingly died. It is oddly parallel that during previews of Attempts on Her Life, Jean Baudrillard, the French postmodernist philosopher died also. Baudrillard questioned continually the status of the images around us, arguing influentially that reality had withered and died behind the simulacrum we made of the world. He argued that we had entered a realm in which politics, wars, identity and terrorism was being conducted at the level of the simulacrum, not of reality. These themes evidently influenced Martin Crimp in the writing of his play, and they continue to be developed in Katie Mitchell’s staging, in which often video images are composed on the screen which have no direct referent on stage, in which the perfection of the images is caustically at odds with the chaos on stage. I prefer to think of the play as being in dialogue with Baudrillard, not wholeheartedly adopting his anti-realism but questioning it, employing its tropes to shock us into moral reassessment, but these effects and the pertinence of these questions are undoubtedly powering and animating the play and the production, creating a profound and daring and restless investigating into the roots of the contemporary moment.
The hostile commentators share a number of tropes themselves. Three main groups of accusation stick out. The first is that it is ’self-indulgent’. The second is that it is ‘pretentious’. The third is that this is theatre about theatre.
Self-indulgence is an accusation thrown at Katie Mitchell because she has what British directors aren’t supposed to have, a signature. Writers are supposed to have it. Designers are acclaimed for it. Directors, on the other hand, are supposed to be humble handmaidens who bring forward the play for our interest and draw no attention to themselves. We don’t have to rehearse these arguments here because Attempts on Her Life is a text that cannot be directed without the direction drawing attention to itself. Crimp has deliberately given only minimal information; the lines of dialogue, indications of new speaker, the organisation of these into separate scenes or scenarios. Almost nothing else. No director can direct this material without making strong interventions in it; its a text that requires directorial supplementation (and yes, supplement, for those who care, in Derrida’s sense of the word). And, hey, you know what? No play can be performed without strong directorial interventions; this play pushes this fact to the foreground. Katie Mitchell, by stamping her signature on the play, is, paradoxically, strictly following the author’s intentions.
Pretentious. Do these people know what pretentious means? It doesn’t mean arty-farty. It doesn’t mean clever-clever. It combines two roots that have become fused; one, from the French, carried the meaning of ostentatiousness and showiness; the second, from the Latin, indicates a false claim to unpossessed merit. The message-boarders who claim it’s pretentious seem to be saying that it has a claim to intellectual significance that it doesn’t really possess. But that’s not self-evident. In fact, it seems pretty evident that this company have thought very deeply about the ideas and images they are presenting, that they are profoundly interested in the intellectual concerns of the play as well as the form of its staging. Really, what its opponents seem to mean is that they shouldn’t be thinking about these things, that to think deeply and profoundly about the nature of art, obligation, power and representation is unworthy. The accusation of pretentiousness, here as so often elsewhere, is a deeply anti-intellectual stance that wants to impose limits on the theatre, to bring it down to their unthinking level.
Lastly, there is this fascinating idea that this is theatre about theatre and therefore a bad thing. Edward Albee once said that any good play should tell us something about the world and something about the theatre. Attempts on Her Life tells us a lot about both and it does the former through doing the latter, but the literalists are so fucking naive about theatre they think any formal innovation is just condensation on the theatre’s window on the world. Could someone explain what play ever said anything profound at the level of content alone? Macbeth tells us that power corrupts, The Wild Duck that the truth can be painful, Waiting for Godot tells us that we may delude ourselves by hoping for social or spiritual saviours. Who, really, ever needed to be told these things? But why these plays make these ideas so compelling, so arresting, so life-changing is because of their form and it’s the form of each that makes the experience so valuable. And form doesn’t decorate truth, in the theatre it constitutes it. Form is not the Trojan horse, the sugar on the pill, it’s the pill and it’s the Trojans, it’s what theatre can give us, it’s why art is important, and it’s why everyone who cares for the theatre’s future should go and see Attempts on Her Life.
17 Comments currently posted.
DE says:
theatre worker says:
The reasoning’s fine - you’re quoting selectively. We don’t just say they have ‘thought very deeply about the ideas and images they are presenting, that they are profoundly interested in the intellectual concerns of the play as well as the form of its staging’.
We say ‘it seems pretty evident that this company have thought very deeply about the ideas and images they are presenting, that they are profoundly interested in the intellectual concerns of the play as well as the form of its staging’ [emphasis added].
Those words at the beginning make it clear we are talking about what is manifest in the performance, not merely a fact about the way they rehearsed. Those ideas and that thinking is embodied in the production.
This should also deal with the worry in your penultimate paragraph.
Will says:
I enjoyed Attempts on her Life enormously. It was fantastic to see that play on that stage and a bold statement by Hytner to programme it.
However, I thought the production was quite uneven. The Newsnight Review segment and The Statement are good examples of this. They were satirising quite specific kinds of television programmes from the 90s, indeed in the latter, they were impersonating particular well known broadcasters. Both scenes were presented as rather obvious and clumsy pastiches. The more abstract scenes, the ones that genuinely put the language at the fore, were more successful. For example, the Kinda Funny, Kinda Sad monologue was beautiful.
Many of the accusations directed at Mitchell and the production are beligerent and/or philistine, but just because one might locate oneself in her corner in the broadest sense doesn’t mean one has to insist that everything she does is perfect.
Andrew Field says:
TW,
Thanks for the comments - much appreciated. This is a lovely piece and, if your interested, I’ve mentioned it in a follow up piece about the various lines/trenches that seem to be being drawn (or dug) in the sand over this particular production.
Will,
I don’ think that perfection/imperfection come into it. I think with a piece that highlights the subjectivity and ambiguity of any representation it is clear that to assume the kind of imagined critically objective stance that is so latent in the superior tone adopted by Billington et al is utterly flawed. I think that what myself, David Eldridge and TW (among others who have praised this production) were trying to do was verbalise the startling effect that this show had on us, which (in my case at least) was wholly positive.
Similarly, the kind of fierce support that Mitchell has recieved here and elsewhere is not about suggesting she is in any sense perfect. For me, it is less about her individual merits and flaws and more about what she represents. I will fight tooth and nail (no matter how small and insignificant those teeth and nails are…) to make sure that experimentation, ambition and intelligence such as hers continues to have a presence at the heart of our greatest theatre institutions, as a statement-of-intent for theatre-makers and theatre-audiences alike.
theatre worker says:
Thanks Will, thanks Andrew.
Will, you’re right, of course that we don’t have to believe the production was 100% perfect to like it. I had a couple of reservations about it, in fact, and think the level of invention of development flagged somewhat at the one-hour mark. There are some confusions in the location of the material in the 1990s that jarred with me. But these are signs of invention, risk-taking, working at the edges of the known. There were moments of glorious failure in the show, but the general vision of what theatre can and should be justified all that.
I think you’re right about the Late Show pastiche in some ways but actually I think this is a weakness in the script. I always feel slightly disappointed when we get to that moment in Attempts on Her Life because it feels like the moment where, most clearly, Crimp is giving us guidance in how to watch this play. I like the text when it is at its most elusive and mercurial, most evasive and morally unspeakable.
Sometimes, I think we - as theatre makers, theatre workers, theatre artists, theatre critics, and theatre goers - just need to bear witness to moments of magnificence that open up possibility in our creative, cultural and ethical lives. Crimp’s play was such an occasion for me when it first appeared and this production is another.
Alison Croggon says:
Very interesting to read this, in terms of exactly parallel arguments that are happening in my neck of the woods between those who want the theatre to exist as a dynamic part of contemporary arts practice - and the world we actually live in - and those who seem to think that the well-made play comprehends the apogee of theatre’s possible achievement and that anything that departs from this is wankery and pretension.
Will says:
Thank you, TW and Andrew. The reason I used the term perfection, which may of course be inappropriate when applied to someone like Mithcell, was the danger that the defences of the play would present it as wholly triumphant, while, as you both point out, one of the inevitable consequences of working in this way is that there will be imperfections. I felt this very much about Waves. It took me a while to get into it, but when I did I adored it. The experience was that of adjusting to new forms. Not something you really expect to have to do in the Royal National Theatre!
theatre worker says:
Exactly. Your last comment, of course, makes me wonder if we should separate venue from production in some way. Obviously that’s not wholly possible, or even desirable. But are we more excited about this show because it’s at the National? Some of the show is reminiscent of things that The Wooster Group have done, but when we see them at the Riverside Studios it’s less surprising somehow. Some of the aesthetic is pretty mainstream in performance art. But of course that budget is not and Mitchell does things that seem to me richer emotionally than most performance art I see and that’s partly about working with trained and experienced actors, the level of technical support you can get at the National, the monumental Lyttelton stage etc. What do people thinjk. If we saw this same show as part of BITE, would we be enraptured in the same way?
theatre worker says:
And good to hear from you, Alison, as ever. We’ve read your brilliant defences, of course, of people like Barker against the philistinism of middlebrow Australian theatregoing but what have been the major recent flashpoints over there?
Andrew Field says:
Interesting that you should mention The Wooster Group TW, I saw their Hamlet in Paris and it makes a nice companion piece to Mitchell’s Attempts… little review here (http://thearcadesproject.blogspot.com/2006/11/hamlet-at-pompidou-centre-paris.html)
Both seem (justifiably in my mind) obsessed by the troubled relationship between theatre/live performance and film. Whereas Mitchell uses the stage to construct a filmic representation The Wooster Group used started with a film (of a stage production) and attempted to reconstruct it through live performance. Both, for me, highlighted the limitless potential of the imaginary space of film and its troubled relationship with the ‘real’ (or at least physical and hence limited) space of theatre. I am at present trying to put something together on how two such disparate ’spaces’ function alongside each other in productions like these - any thoughts would be much appreciated.
As for the significance of venue - I would have to say that it is undoubtedly significant in two very different ways.
In the first case, our horizon of expectation for a production when squashing ourselves into a seat in the lyttleton is fundamentally different from that when we somewhat tentatively shuffle into the Pit - hence our relationship to that production will be different in both cases and, yes, Mitchell’s piece really got to us because the limited expectations for what we expect from that environment. Similarly, when ‘terrorists’ grabbed plants in the audience and pulled them up onstage during a production of the Opera The Death of Klinghoffer in the utterly decadent Festival Theatre in Edinburgh it had a real impact on me, whereas the same trick in a small, sweaty fringe festival studio in the city during a piece of theatre by a student company would probably come across as a cheap gimmick. The apparatus of theatre radically affects our relationship to any specific show.
Secondly, as I briefly touched on earlier, politically, to see a production such as Mitchell’s in a space like the national (with its cultural status, its traditional audience and most significantly its huge funding) thrilled me in a very different way. I was cheered and wished to support even the attempt at something so ‘difficult’ in such an environment. It’s too easy to retreat to the studio spaces and the experimental festivals - institutions as large and culturally significant as the national shouldn’t be abandoned to Restoration comedies and Tenesse Williams. It is through the involvement of these institutions that this thrilling, difficult work can find the audiences and have the impact it deserves.
Sorry to twitter on at such length. Hope some of it is of interest.
Will says:
Have a look at Andrew Haydon’s review on Culture Wars. The backlash against ‘amateur’ bloggers and reviewers by the broadsheet critics made me laugh. As if you’d ever get anything this articulate and intellectually rigorous in a newspaper…
both pretentious and boring « the notional theatre says:
[…] Attempts on Her Life is really part of the same debate. It’s not boring. If you’ve got the balls (apparently unlike some of the walker-outers at the whatsonstage board) then you can fight the deluge of images and struggle to draw your conclusions from Crimp and Mitchell’s uncompromised circus of situations and angles. For what it’s worth, I thought that the permanent presence of the (thrilling) camera work gave it feet of clay. Crimp’s scenarios are about a lot of things, and there were times when the production seemed to filter all of the text’s potential through a limiting lens: I know that we use the media to shape lots of our understanding of life - but it’s not the only way I understand people. It was also hard not to feel that the camera action was clumsy set next to the overwhelmingly detailed (and beautiful) choreography of Waves. That said, I wasn’t much taken with the content of Waves - it was pretty much pure theatre to me - and am much more interested by the content in Attempts. The focus on media gave the text a fierce clarity of purpose which it might not have in some of the more catholic productions - and it seemed conscious of its status as not the only ever production. I think that’s what I like most about Mitchell’s shows now - this is her version and it’s not the end of the story. Clearly Hytner has made a good choice in continuing to invite her back to be a standard bearer for intelligent experiment in his programme. How great to be watching the rock band section thrash away in the bland old Lyttelton, with memories of the (equally effective but totally different) lush underscoring of Therese Raquin still in memory. I’m suspicious of encore’s effort to turn it into a polarised fight between the backward lithic critics and the fiery knights of progress - it’s only a show, it’s got problems - but I was much more appalled by the people who seem to be offended by it. Blimey, fogeys, it’s a national theatre, not just yours. I mean, sure, be offended by Jerry Springer if you don’t believe in freedom of speech and creativity (and expose yourself as a censor). But what’s to be offended by in a play that has a good go at discussing perception and reality, in a production that actually makes it easier to take something from? does your world not include rock and pop music, police progammes and late review and crappy films and adverts and all the rest? Discuss that some of the media satire was pretty limp (and Mitchell isn’t that assured as a film director..) engage with what’s in fornt of you. These people seem not to be interested in content - there’s plenty to get their (presumably gritted) teeth into in both staging and text, nor in theatre - theatricality - they would be having a lovely time. If they think theatre is just character acting and relationships then they probably need to be more selective when booking seats. […]
Review - Attempts on her Life, National Theatre « West End Whingers says:
[…] With Åke brought up to speed on the story so far, it was in to the Littleton’s circle via what should be a mandatory stop at the Gents to minimise the risk of embarrassment - Attempts on her Life is 1hr 50 mins without an interval. […]
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The argument presented by Encore in the penultimate paragraph is unsound.
1. Encore claims that what message-boarders mean by pretentiousness is “a claim to intellectual significance that [an entity] doesn’t really possess”.
2. Encore then offers its knock-down rebuttal: that the company of AOHL “thought very deeply about the ideas and images they are presenting, that they are profoundly interested in the intellectual concerns of the play as well as the form of its staging.”
Unfortunately, THIS assertion is not self-evident. Simply because there might be evidence that a company have thought deeply about ideas and images - or even that they might be profoudly interested in intellectual concerns of the play - does not mean that what is presented onstage is of intellectual significance. After all, one might have thought profoundly about a piece of art before its creation only to find the result devoid of any trace of these thoughts. Even if the piece of art possesses TRACES of these thoughts, the intellectual significance of the piece might not be sufficient to satisfy some.
Furthermore, thinking something is pretentious is NOT the same as claiming that “the nature of art, obligation, power and representation is unworthy” of thought - but simply that the result might show that the profound thoughts have not lead to a meaningful result. After all, the trappings of intellectual thoughts alone do not necessarily a theatrical experience make.
While I enjoy reading ENCORE, it is ultimately dissatisfying when its reasoning is as flawed as the groups it purports to rebut. When this occurs, both sides of the argument (message-boarders and online boggers) seem to be reliant on personal bias.