The beginning

With the Bench, in order to direct a play you have to make a pitch to the membership, who then take a vote. I went through this process in June of this year, a little hastily as, bizarrely, I had only read the play for the first time the day before I was due to make my pitch. Even so, I managed to find some time to get my initial ideas down on paper, so I thought it would be useful to start this blog by posting those initial thoughts. So here they are:

Attempts on Her Life Pitch

What is it?

• Billed as 17 scenarios for the theatre, it is a text which dispenses with plot and character, leaving only passages of dialogue which are precise yet fragmented. They explain nothing but refer to so many possibilities. Lines are not assigned to given speakers. Some are monologue, some duologue, some are poetic, some run together and others read more like voiceovers.
• It is an event, an experience, an exploration, rather than a conventional piece of theatre.

What is it about?

• Nothing specific, but you detect recurring themes which are very relevant to today. Violence, terrorism, identity, commoditization, the media, and overall a kaleidoscopic view of the end of the 20th Century.
• The title doesn't seem to refer to assassination attempts, but rather to attempts to define a life. Specifically Anne, who is the subject of each piece but is impossible to pin down. This is a theme I would be keen to bring out.

My response to it.

• It baffled me, it infuriated me, it made me laugh, it fascinated me, it offended me, it excited me. It gave me sleepless nights. I'm not actually sure if I like it, but I feel compelled to do it.
• The prospect of doing it terrifies me, and that is precisely what attracts me to it.
• I imagine audiences will respond in exactly the same way.

The Challenges

• A big part of me expects this pitch to be unsuccessful because I imagine people will identify the scale of the challenges as pretty insurmountable. I imagine people thinking “how can I vote for something when I don't have a clear sense of what it can be?” “How can we sell this to an audience?” “How can we be sure that an audience will like it?” Even, “how the hell to we begin to stage it?”
• My response to all of these questions will be the same: I don't know. But to me that is no reason not to do it. Recently the Bench has begun to reevaluate what is possible, and what we do. HDM showed us that scale is not necessarily an issue. Grimm Tales demonstrated that we can be comfortable working in different forms. Frozen reminded us that we don't shy away from controversial subject matter. We currently have a large membership with lots of young talent. Pitching this play in itself could be seen as a challenge to test the courage of the company.

The way of working

• One of the most exciting prospects of this play is that we won't truly know how it will turn out until we enter rehearsal.
• Katie Mitchell has just directed a successful revival at the National. I’m a big admirer of her work having seen her Dream Play a couple of years ago. What struck me about this is that the director credit lists “Katie Mitchell and the Company.” This is absolutely how I want to work. It needs an ensemble approach where a number of people collectively make the interpretative decisions. It will need a single person to make the overall decisions and focus the work, making sure the piece is a coherent whole, but beyond that there is a real opportunity to explore a different way of working with text.
• We need to identify a holding form that provides a shape to the shapeless, characters will need to be found and developed, lines will need to be assigned.
• What is great is that the final piece will be defined absolutely by the people that end up working on it. I think we could work with a cast of around 16 – 20, perhaps providing opportunities for members of the ensemble to direct individual scenes. But equally the piece could be cast with as few as three or four. Above twenty and it might be cumbersome, but I wouldn’t even be averse to the idea of having 5 different casts, making it a unique performance every evening!
• The process would involve a combination of text analysis, character development, improvisation and all forms of exploration.
• Decisions about the final piece would likely be made very late in the day, which means a dedicated technical crew would need to be an integral part of the ensemble, responding to and even contributing to the evolution of the performance.
• I would like to utilize modern technology (sound, film, live camera work, digital imagery). This would mean finding people with the necessary skills and equipment, ideally within the company, but possibly from outside.

A concept as such

• I do have some ideas of what we might be saying here. I would like to explore the idea that the play is an examination of a human being as a work of art. For all of its dispassionate tones, self-conscious cleverness and cynicism, at its core the play seems to have a very human intention. A struggle to define what it is to be human – a commentary on how one woman can be all things to all people, and how one definition, one label can never fully encapsulate a life. A person is a web of contradictions, desires, needs, drives, delusions. Attempts on Her Life tries to provide a comprehensive picture of a woman who is familiar yet at the same time totally mysterious.

Who is Anne?

She is a lover, a daughter, an activist, a terrorist, a whore, an artist, an invention, a symbol, and object (of desire, or ridicule). She is 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, a woman, everywoman, the girl next door.

As you can see, this is quite rambling and, like the play, formless. I felt very unprepared and, as I mentioned in the pitch, very unsure as to whether the company would go for such an avant-garde piece of work. Imagine my surprise then when, a fortnight later, the membership gave its approval for the project with what I have been told was a very healthy majority.