Something nasty

‘I’m not a snob. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who matters.’ The author of this self-knowing gem is Simon LeBon and I read it on a freesheet discarded on the bus that took me to see Martin Crimp’s state-of-the-nation play, Attempts on her Life. Amazingly, this tossed-aside gag was the high point of my evening. Mr Crimp, a busy playwright with the resources of the National Theatre at his disposal, failed to produce anything as perceptive or entertaining as LeBon’s throwaway quip. Crimp’s play is a restless self-important plague of words and video-images, scruffy, impressionistic, ill-shaped and rambling, rather like this sentence, going everywhere and nowhere in particular. Katie Mitchell directs, and instead of a story she gives us a barrage of chat, TV spoofs and newsreader’s announcements which inform us, rather obliquely, about a young woman named Anne.

It was hard work but after an hour I began to glean some idea of Anne’s character.