You have to hand it to Anne Tipton. This year's winner of the James Menzies-Kitchin Memorial Trust Award, the prize for promising young directors, has got courage. Martin Crimp's coolly European meditation in 17 scenes on a woman, also called Anne - who may be a terrorist on the run, or an artist who has turned her suicide attempts into her art, or a traveller who has her photo taken by millionaires' swimming pools and in slums, or a woman whose children have been slaughtered in civil war, or even a child herself - is not an easy text for any director. And particularly not for one right at the start of her career and without lots of resources. Why? Amateur companies tend to have much shorter runs, in smaller spaces and with much less time in which to construct and road-test elaborate sets, making physical construction very ineffective in terms of time and cost. But film lends almost infinite flexibility to a production. The audience can be transported to the four corners of the globe in an instant through the projection of simple, recognisable images. The visible space can be distorted, meaning entirely separate locations can concurrently occupy the same space as the performers, and the apparent limitations of what can take place in real time on stage are removed with the careful use of pre-recorded and edited footage. And all of these things are extremely portable, particularly in this digital age. Applaud what he is doing or not (many may be reminded of the Woody Allen line about “achiev(ing) total heaviosity”), Crimp mines a recognizable vein, and one can imagine American directors like Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars desperate to get their hands on the text. Attempts on Her Life' is theatrical event, and therefore the audience's experience must remain a theatrical one. It has been a key consideration that the projections should never be used to do what theatre can do perfectly well on its own. The function of film has been to focus the audience's attention to something specific on the stage, to add another dimension to the action, to support the live work of the actors and perhaps to subvert it at times, but never to replace it.

This clash reached its peak towards the end of the play, in the scene in which Maddy Walker played a pretentious European art critic. While the scene was funny in its ruthless satire, behind the comedy lay a sinister idea. The artwork in the scene was about ‘ attempts on her life, ’ but the nature of these attempts remained ambiguous, with Crimp seeming to gesture towards the possibilities of suicide, murder, torture and so on, without ever laying his cards on the table. What was most disconcerting, and what made the production so powerful, was the sense in which all of the horrific events in the play became pieces of performance art, indistinguishable from one another. Similarly, the wide variety of interpretations which the play offers only intensifies the discomfort, and this production managed to leave these interpretive strands wide open. Crimp seems to suggest that these ‘ attempts on her life ’ could be genuine torture scenarios in a dystopian nightmare. Or they could mean absolutely nothing at all — and that is what is most frightening. Thomson and his actors balanced the comic with the deeply sinister, in what was a stunning production of an immensely powerful play. The term "director" for this production must be used loosely. In fact I feel fraudulent in adopting this title, as this project has been, and was always intended to be, a highly collaborative one, in which the divisions between actors, director, crew and designers are blurred by everyone having responsibility for making the creative and interpretative decisions about the performance. Neil Kendall is impressive in his scenes - particularly the brilliant scene comparing Anne to a car - and Callum West's contributions showed flashes of real skill. Zoë Chapman stood out among the women. It's good to see theatre like this being presented locally and the Bench's opening night audience was a fair size. This is theatre for the thinking man or woman. Enjoy. The play continues its run until Saturday. I didn't want the actors to be restricted by these newly discovered characters at the expense of other ideas, so we didn't refer directly to these initial exercises when working on the text. Rather the focus was on identifying a solid, workable context for each scene. The media pervades the entire play, and what emerged was a sense that each scene depicted some kind of outside agency creating, manipulating or responding to an image of Anne, thus we ended up with film executives, PR teams, photographers, journalists and audiences, and each context dictated the form of the scene. We have tried to vary each episode, really out of necessity, as it is impossible to reach a unified definition of Anne because the play is full of contradictory accounts. It seemed for a long time that our initial exploration was to have little influence on the finished product, but there were certain moments in rehearsal when, as if by magic, we found ourselves remembering those early characters and realising that they were consistent with the roles people were playing in various scenes. I loved these moments - they vindicated the exploratory process and made us realise that everything we have tried has had an influence on the shape of the play, even if only on a subconscious level. Finally, 'Attempts on Her Life' is a very modern play, and the use of these elements gives our production a similarly modern feel. I believe that we have been true to the spirit of Crimp's play, and have acquired new skills, explored further possibilities in the process. Does what we have done here reinforce the positives that new technology can bring to the theatre? Or does this technology simply get in the way? Ultimately, that is for you, the audience to decide, and I would be delighted if these decisions provoke the same diversity of views that 'Attempts on her Life' as a play seems to encourage.

Alert

He became writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997 and several of his plays have been performed there. Possibly his most highly-regarded and most innovative play is 'Attempts on Her Life', a deliberately fragmented work which challenges an audience to re-define its notion of what constitutes a 'play' and might seem to question whether someone has any existence beyond the models we construct.

As it is, this Royal Court regular is well served in London by Tim Albery (director of the Metropolitan Opera’s recent “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the playwright’s partner in deconstructionist crime, and by a set from Gideon Davey that makes full, often eerie use of the Theater Upstairs’ two stage spaces. It’s not every writer who would pose much of his play in the form of a question, almost as if the language itself were interrogating the listener. But then it’s not every director who could ensure that the queries count — or, put another way, that a play about an elusive central character doesn’t elude us.I was re-reading the script a few weeks ago and noticed a quote from Jean Baudrillard that Crimp has used to preface the text of his play: "No-one will have directly experienced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them." The significance of this hitherto disregarded quote became apparent to me, as did the fact that, for all his posturings that this play has no specific meaning and is in some cases writing for the sake of it, Crimp very clearly knew what he was saying. As I started to reflect on our work on the play, it seemed as though our organic interpretation of the scenes was sympathetic to this notion.Baudrillard seems to be saying that, in our media-saturated world, we have access to a staggering amount of information about people and events of which we haven't had first hand experience. Yet at the same time these people and events touch our lives, stay with us, and we form opinions about them while simultaneously allowing them to influence our outlook in other aspects of our lives. Though the drama was challenging to navigate as an audience member, that is not to say that it ever seemed self-indulgent or pointlessly obscure. There were moments where Crimp ’ s surrealist visions emerged as social commentary: one scene involved Bilton and Higgins playing a pair of glazed-eyed, slimy salespeople tasked with selling a new car, ‘ The Annie. ’ If turning the unseen ‘ Annie ’ into a car were not sinister enough, the superficiality of the advert — undoubtedly a comment on capitalism — gradually mutated into a proclamation of the merits of an Arian state. The zombie-like stares and lobotomised smiles created one of the funniest yet most deeply disturbing scenes of the play. The programme notes, somewhat defensively one feels, leap to rebuff allegations of pretentiousness and there's no doubt that some quarters would raise this point against the piece - but regardless of the truth of that it remains a fascinating exploration of human individuality, nevertheless.

He has been writer-in-residence for both theatre and television, including at Thames Television, the New Dramatists (New York) and the Royal Court Theatre in London and has adapted his own work for radio. He has won the Radio Times Drama Award and the John Whiting Award. On the way out of Attempts on Her Life I overheard a student discussing the production. “I’m sure they missed out the scene with the answering machines,” she said. “I love that scene!” Ten years on, and even Martin Crimp’s ultra-contemporary, postmodern piece has become a classic to the extent that devotees grieve when the text is changed.

Director Nathan Chapman's cast aren't always successful in their handling of the complex dialogue. Jeff Bone and Hadleigh Harrison's first scene suffered from an overabundance of pace to the detriment of clarity, but both of these actors later got the measure of the dialogue; some voices - a critically important piece of this show - were drowned out by music. So what we have, with 'Attempts on Her Life', is a number of attempts to define an individual, Anne, by people who have never known her, yet have a lot of information about her. Our production, whether by accident or design, extends this concept, and what we see is the construction of an identity for public consumption. The main perpetrators in our version would seem to be the pair of film executives pitching their ideas to each other in the second scene, yet their lead is followed by all manner of agencies engaged with piecing together what information they have. And where things don't fit, or they contradict each other, these agencies embellish with details that suit their own agendas. In a bizarre case of art mirroring art, the process you will see the characters engaging in tonight is exactly the same process that our ensemble has gone through over the last three or four months. If, during the course of the performance, you find yourself forming opinions, reaching conclusions about who Anne is only to be forced into re-evaluating these decisions a few minutes later as new details come to light, that is exactly what we have done at every rehearsal.

Fortuitously, we had ten actors, and there are ten different people leaving messages, Giving each actor one message, we tried a couple of improvisations. First each actor was to respond as though the message was left for them, and second they were to act as the character who leaves the message. The results were compelling and varied, but each emerging character seemed to contribute to a coherent sense of who Anne was and what has happened to her. This mysterious, unseen woman became someone who has gone missing after getting involved in all manner of dangerous or immoral activities, including prostitution, terrorism, fencing stolen goods, but also a woman who started out with philanthropic intent.There is an ongoing debate about the use of new technology in the theatre. What is accurate is to say that incorporating film, projections and other "non-theatrical" techniques into performances seems to be increasing in popularity, and it is the professional theatre that leads the way. At first glance, this might seem logical. Film is perceived as a time-consuming, expensive pursuit that can only be considered by companies with the time, the resources and the professional expertise to make it work, yet in many respects film is a perfect tool for amateur theatre. He went on to write a novel, 'Still Early Days', and 'An Anatomy', a collection of short stories. He entered a competition for local writers in 1981 run by the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. He won the competition with his play 'Living Remains' and the Orange Tree Theatre went on to stage many of his early pieces, including a number of translations of European plays.