Women as Victims of a Postmodern Society in Martin Crimp's 'Attempts of Her Life' (2019)

Undergraduate Dissertation. Awarded First Class.

Women as Victims of a Postmodern Society.

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Martin Crimp became an interest of mine during my second year when I read Attempts on Her Life for the first time for the module British Theatre since 1956. Crimp's playwriting opened up my eyes to what contemporary theatre and playwriting can be: metaphorical, ambiguous, and unfixable.

Abstract:

Attempts on Her Life(1997) is arguably Martin Crimp's most well-known play for challenging British theatre and the traditions of social realism. Constructed of ‘17 Scenarios for the Theatre’ (Crimp, 1997, 3), the play is centred around the absent multi-faceted protagonist: Anne, Ann, Annie, Anny, Anya, or Annushka. Her identities are described through the storytelling of the speakers onstage, as a traveler, a terrorist, a megastar, a porn-star, a child in two bags, a car, and a dead artist.The Independent’s critic, Paul Taylor, stated: “We never get to the bottom of who - or what - Anne is. Is she an international terrorist [...] or is she herself the object of violence?” (Taylor, 1997). The play’s elusive narrative, featuring undetermined dramatis persona, produced a difficult play for spectators to digest, and even “critics struggled to impose a coherent explanation of the play” (Sierz, 2006, 142). The ambiguous nature of the text has produced many discussions over the past two decades amongst critics, academics, and scholars, who, like Heiner Zimmermann and Mary Luckhurst, strive to find a coherent subject matter, topic, function, and/or purpose within the text. As renowned theatre critic Michael Billington has stated: “since the play is an attack on limiting definitions, it is hard to pin any single meaning to it” (Billington, 2007). However, this dissertation seeks to explore Attempts on Her Life as a postmodern text in which form and content work in concert to dramatise the commodification and objectification of women within a postmodern, late-capitalist society.

I am open for discussions, feedback, and presenting on this play analysis.