Anne, Anny, Annie, Anya. She has several names, hiding behind just as many different identities. She is never seen. In seventeen scenes, following the lines of a cinema cut-out, the narrators or commentators draw a portrait in quasi-documentary style of a woman who defines herself as a “non-character”. A girl without a past, a traveller, a terrorist, a star of pornographic films, she wears the multiple masks of new myths, the fascinating or repulsive icons of our world. Atteintes à sa vie is an ironical x-ray picture of a society which is organised around the anonymity of people. Martin Crimp, the English translator of Jean Genet and Bernard-Marie Koltès, abandons conventional forms of narration to evoke the turpitudes of an elusive heroine. “Any day you could pass by your future murderer or saviour without knowing it,” explains Stanislas Nordey. “We live curiously in this magnificent and terrifying society without knowing who our neighbours are”. Martin Crimp gives a vision of this world that at the same time questions the theatrical form and way that drama is written today.The works of Martin Crimp, born in 1956, are showing in theatres in various places from Broadway to Bruxelles. The Country and The Treatment were recently performed in France. In the middle of the 1990s, the author had written Attempts on her Life for a “troupe of actors whose composition should reflect the composition of the world, beyond the theatre.” The first performance was in London in 1997, and that was when Stanislas Nordey - then director of the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe at Saint-Denis, current director of teaching at the TNB School in Rennes – discovered and met Martin Crimp. His acute view of the world and the mysteries of the complex structure of his text fascinated the director, a vehement explorer of contemporary repertory.
Distribution
stage direction Stanislas Nordey
cast: Jessica Battut, Maëlle Bellec, Marie-Laure Crochant, Émilie Couratier, Guillaume Doucet, Pierre-Emmanuel Fillet, Charline Grand, Nathalie Kiniecik, Lazare, Loïc Le Roux, Elios Noël, Lamya Regragui, Boris Sirdey
translation: Christophe Pellet
artistic collaboration :Loïc Touzé
lighting :Philippe Berthomé
sound: Michel Zürcher
Production
Production :Théâtre national de Bretagne-Rennes
Texte publié par: l'Arche éditeur