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FCA performance presents

Attempts on her Life

12 – 14 November 2009

Written by Martin Crimp
Directed by Sanja Simic (BCA Hons)

Sanja Simic is the Faculty of Creative Arts’ first Honours student to major in Performance. Mentored by Director and Program Coordinator, Tim Maddock, Simic has directed two productions by the internationally acclaimed British playwright Martin Crimp, for her major creative presentation, starting with The Country in June of this year.

Her second production is the highly acclaimed and often performed, Attempts on her Life. Written in 1997 and premiering in the same year at the Royal Court Theatre, London, it has been described as “a brilliantly original and distinctly European play, both a comment on the late twentieth century and a vision of what the theatre of the future might be. (Sierz 2006).

With this work, Crimp abandons the conventions of modern drama preferring to challenge the very concept of representation itself. In so doing he upsets the idea of identity as fixed and stable, through seventeen apparently disconnected ‘theatrical fragments’ that generate contradictory descriptions of an absent protagonist. Crimp subverts dramatic convention through a written text that refuses to assign lines to characters, to define the number of actors, their names or type, and which provides no clues about staging, or suggestions for props.

Who is Anne? Is she a lover, a daughter, a terrorist, a whore? An artist, an invention, a symbol or object – of desire or ridicule -? Is she a car, an idea, a suicide case, a mental patient, a mother, a consumer, the consumed, a conduit for alien domination, a pioneering scientist, a saviour, a brand, the girl next door, a woman, everywoman.

Benchmark Theatre

Thus Crimp liberates the Director by providing an open text that allows her to make all the choices, although if there are any clear themes they revolve around ideas about consumerism, global capitalism and technological change.

You can’t ask me to tell you what Attempts is all about. All I can say is that it’s trying to come to terms with contradictory things in the world, and also contradictory things about writing about the world.

Crimp 2008

Director Sanja Simic employs the skills and talents of seven very different female actors in order to explore the ways in which Crimp’s dense and complex text might be staged and brought to life. Working with recent BCA graduate, Theresa Mullan, as well as current Performance students: Matika Habazin, Rose Maher, Alice Burns-McLintock, Emma McManus, Rachel Roberts and Anthea Savage, Simic’s production relies on their particular bodies in the space, their distinct aesthetic and their full abilities as performers. They are at times, literally stretched to their limits.

“We’re saying that we want to be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity- yes by the sheer quantity – of all the things that Anne can be.”

Attempts on her Life (Crimp 1997)

Simic most recently directed Crimp’s The Country (2009) and was assistant director on [Pre]Paradise Sorry Now, directed by Version 1.0’s Christopher Ryan, which premiered at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (IPAC) in May 2009. Previous directing credits include Michael Gow’s Europe (2008). Gary Owen’s The Drowned World (2008) both under the mentorship of Tim Maddock, and The House that Jack Built written by Miriam Wells (2008).

Season: Thursday 12 – Saturday 14 November @ 8pm
Venue: Performance Space, 25.168, Faculty of Creative Arts UoW
Bookings: 02 4221 4889
Tickets: $20 full, $12 Conc & $10 FCA

Parking: Pay and Display parking is available in the Western and South Western Carparks or free parking on weekends or from 6.30pm weekdays. View Maps

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For further information contact the
School of Music & Drama, Faculty of Creative Arts
Phone: 02 4221 3996
Email: mandd@uow.edu.au