Attempts on her Life: Martin Crimp
(1997)
‘To say that [the play] is postmodern is like
saying that the Pope is Catholic; it is also postcivilisation, post-truth, post-art, post-feeling,
post-teeth, post-everything… Who cares? Not
for a moment does the play suggest that its
author does… [Crimp’s] method is far more
depersonalised than the depersonalised
modernity on which he pretends to comment’
– Alastair Macauley, Financial Times, 1997
POSTMODERNISM
• References and allusions to popular culture
• An acute awareness of images: made fake and
contradictory
• Playful, Ironic, use of Parody and
Impersonation
• The spectator has to participate
– Deconstruction
– A fight against superficiality?
Scenario 11: Untitled (100 words)
• Swiss psychotherapist Carl
Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
developed his 100 word
association test in 1909.
David Cronenberg (dir.) A
Dangerous Method, 2011
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
Jameson’s critical stance:
• Postmodernism is no longer a critical attitude but
an empty aesthetic form.
• Capitalism subsumes and consumes all of
previous history. Anything can return but only as
a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for
living.
• We lose our connection to history. The historical
past is transformed into a series of emptied-out
stylisations (pastiche) that can be commodified
and consumed.
1997: Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills Retrospective at MoMA,
New York, Sponsored by Madonna
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s Postmodern
Critique
• “Ooh my little monsters pay / Lots cos I
perform this way” –Weird Al Yankovic,
Perform This Way (2011)
• ‘Authentity’ – or the illusion of authenticity proves highly marketable in late capitalism.
(think of the number of products described as
‘real’, ‘100% genuine’).
• We reproduce the styles of the past without
anxiety.
Barbara Kruger
You Are Not Yourself: 1984
I Shop Therefore I Am: 1987
Barbara Kruger – Selfridges Campaign
(2007)
A world without a point?
•
‘She’d find the whole concept of ‘making a point’ ludicrously
outmoded… the whole point of the exercise – i.e. these
attempts on her own life – points to that’ (Scenario 11,
Attempts on her Life)
• ‘You could argue that the play would not be so disturbing if it
did not honourably risk a confusion between its own values
and those depicted’ – Paul Taylor, The Independent, 10 May,
2000
• ‘Irony is just me. Scepticism is another important value within
our culture. [...] it is not the same as postmodernism, because
postmodernism [...] is an embrace of [...] contradictions and
even injustices which are so deeply part of our culture [...]
whereas scepticism is quite different because it does imply a
moral position. ... That’s what my irony is about.’
Anne is reported to have
the impression that ‘she
is not a real character,
not a real character like
you get in a book or on
TV, but a lack of
character, an absence…
of character’ (Scenario 6)
Little Anne is reported to
have confessed to her
Mum and Dad that she
feels ‘like a TV screen…
where everything in front
looks real and alive, but
round the back there’s
just dust and a few wires’
(Scenario 6)
Katie Mitchell’s 1999
production:
“A powerful feminist study of
the suicidal pressures on the
identity-shifting modern
woman” in which Mitchell
made it clear that the play is
about “the protective,
ultimately suicidal camouflages
forced on one woman by
consumerist society”.
“Crimp’s play radically changes
its meaning according to its
context”. - Michael Billington
Crimp’s 2 stage directions:
• “This piece is for a company of actors whose
composition should reflect the composition of
the world beyond the theatre.”
• “Let each scenario in words – the dialogue –
unfold against a distinct world – a design which best exposes its irony.”