TEHRAN – Hilaj Theater in Tehran is hosting the play “Attempts on Her Life” written by Martin Crimp on its stage.

Morteza Bonabi is the director of the play, which has Amirhossein Zourmand and Shaghayegh Kameshgaran as the cast members.

Originally written in 1997, Martin Crimp’s lurid, shocking, and at times hilarious skewering of the traditional ‘play’ dives headlong into a deep pool of modern preoccupations: violence, death, art, the media, and more. 

Riven with anger and passion, Crimp conjures 17 stirring fragments of loosely interconnected stories that offer up several different perspectives on the life of Anne, the amorphous, shape-shifting protagonist, and her struggle – perhaps our struggle – to carve out her own identity in the modern world.

Ann, a woman with various identities, links all the scenes: she is the heroine of a film in one, a victim of civil war in another, an international terrorist, and the subject of a conversation among friends. She is the living embodiment of Crimp's underlying declaration that coherent identity in the modern world is little more than myth.

Martin Crimp's 17 scenarios for the theater, shocking and hilarious by turn, are a rollercoaster of late 20th-century obsessions. From ethnic violence to terrorism, its strange array of nameless characters attempts to invent the perfect story to encapsulate our time.

Through the course of 17 distinct but interconnected scenarios, a group of unnamed characters tries to piece together the identity of the mysterious Anne. Crimp’s play brings us on a whistle-stop journey through the emotional and political landscapes of our time, taking in art, surveillance, terrorism, genocide, and globalization along the way.

What holds the 17 scenarios together is their subject: the mysterious Anne. Over the course of the play, Anne never appears; instead, various figures discuss her life. Anne could perhaps be an international terrorist, a victim of violence, or even an expensive car. In the end, we can’t be sure if she is any of these… a missing person, the girl next door, or even dead or alive, real or fictional.

“Attempts on Her Life” leaves us guessing – and guessing about our own reality in the age of global capital and media culture.

“Attempts on her Life” is not about discovering the truth of Anne’s identity, but the process by which we discover the truth. The play is after the big question: How is it that we come to know the Other? Crimp suggests that the process of knowing is never a neutral one, and in fact, that the subject perpetuates a violence on the object that it seeks to know. It is no coincidence that the object of investigation in this play is a woman, since the female Other has been the object of the male gaze since time immemorial.

Having been translated into 20 languages and performed worldwide, “Attempts on Her Life” is considered a modern masterpiece, a landmark text that tears up the theatrical rulebook and sets fire to the scraps. 

“Attempts on Her Life” will remain on stage until January 23 at the Hilaj Theater, located at No. 22, Samandarian (Mohajer) Alley, Iranshahr St., Karim Khan Zand Blvd.

SS/SAB