Lyttelton

When Martin Crimp’s play was first staged ten years ago, an esteemed colleague proclaimed it obscure, terrible, a piece “from which one flees as from the Tower of Babel”. Myself, I rather admired its fragmentary, fin-de-siãcle portrait of our world and can cite in my support the abundance of foreign productions that have followed that premiere. Anyway, Crimp surely meant to define the planet as a Tower of Babel or Bedlam — and who can quarrel with that in 2007?

Whether this justifies the bold, busy — at times overbusy — revival it now gets from Katie Mitchell I’m not wholly sure. The 11-person cast take a zillion roles each. The sounds vary from police sirens to helicopters to explosions to a Beethoven sonata played by an actor. Cameras fill a stark Lyttelton stage and duplicate almost every encounter in close-up on massive screens. If you doubted that you belonged to a narcissistic, voyeuristic society, well, you won’t leave the National with any doubt.

So where’s the coherence in the play’s 17 short scenes? As one of the guests in an entertaining parody of a BBC culture show might say, the coherence is the incoherence. The protagonist, though she’s more discussed than seen, is called Anne, but also Annie, Anya and Anushka. In her various incarnations she’s a terrorist, a self-destructive artist, a suicidal tour guide, a porn star, a murdered child in a Balkan war, the wife of a militiaman with a hatred of blacks and gays and even a car, the Anny, a motor so select that it refuses to carry blacks or gays.

Is Anne a series of representative 21st-century women or one extremely flexible person? The answer hardly matters, for Crimp uses the name to express both the cynicism and the confusion he feels at an era he regards as violent, bigoted, consumerist, spoilt and self-hating. The problem is that the play becomes so scattershot that you feel Anne could be anyone from a girl on a swing to an old lady poisoning pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

Don’t be surprised if some critics call this pretentious. On the other hand, don’t be too disarmed when Crimp preempts that accusation by introducing a Germaine Greer clone to praise that suicidal artist for “making the point that the point is not the point”. Yet one of the National’s functions is to take risks and embrace the odd and outré. And Claudie Blakley, Kate Duchene, Zubin Varla and the rest of Mitchell’s cast kept me absorbed and alert. But maybe I’m prejudiced. My wife is called Anne.

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