Attempts On Her Life

Anne. Anya. Annie. Anny. Annushka. Internationally wanted terrorist. Cold-blooded murderer. Tourist in Piedmont. Artist. Mother. Lover. The girl next door. Physicist. Movie star. Young and old. Victim and perpetrator. Rich and poor. Her face appears on the covers of VOGUE, her name in faxed reports about ethnic cleansing, her body in sexist conversations between film producers. A group of intellectuals discusses a political manifesto she is alleged to have written, while a pop song repeats her name on an endless loop. Who is she supposed to be? Is she the one person or the other? Is she all of them at once? Is it all imagination? Where is the truth hidden about a life? And who is talking about her: friends, girlfriends, family, fleeting acquaintances, contemporaries, society, a writer, a god?

In his visionary 1997 play, the British playwright Martin Crimp pieced together »17 scenarios for the theatre« to form a blurry portrait of a woman from an array of vague clues and contradictory information – set against the backdrop of the Balkan War playing out on TV in real time. Sequences of acting, choreography, film footage and voice-overs attempt to grasp hold of Anne. Where is the truth when images are being produced incessantly and all over the place? Which reality prevails in a world flooded with pictures and events? What remains of the euphoria of the first mobile phones and internet forums, of the promises of globalisation, of the media-conveyed horror of international terrorism? Almost 30 years after its publication, Lilja Rupprecht rereads Crimp’s text and looks back to the 1990s from the perspective of today.