The eponymous treatment in Martin
Crimp’s play is both the page or so on which Anne has sketched out her
regular abuse by her husband – he binds and gags her while,
gimp-masked, he rants to her about... er... the beauty of the world –
and the way she is ground up when she attempts to have it told
onscreen. A couple of “facilitators” insist that it must be made the
tale of a plucky survivor of sexual assault; the star who brings the
money ensures that it becomes about the male perpetrator; most
damningly, an assistant peremptorily declares of her, “This is not my
idea of Anne.” Treatment of material, and treatment of human beings and
lives as nothing more than material.
When Crimp’s play premièred in 1993, it was looked upon as a savage
satire of the impersonal machineries of both media and individual
people, perhaps particularly in New York where the piece is set and
from which Crimp had just returned at the time. A quarter century on,
it strikes me as having admittedly been prescient but nevertheless now
truistical almost to the point of banality. When one of the mainstays
of our screen entertainment is “structured reality” and even the US
presidency becomes a spinoff from a TV gameshow, how can we be expected
to respond to this story as at all caricatured or egregious? OK,
there’s the blind taxi driver and the reactionary writer who wants to
introduce “a Shakespearean element” to the story and gets the Earl of
Gloucester treatment himself... but none of these motifs of vision
challenge ours.
Lyndsey Turner’s production is, of course, top-notch. Indira Varma and
Julian Ovenden as the dealmakers, Gary Beadle as the star and Ian
Gelder as the writer all turn in tastefully solipsistic performances.
This creates a test for Matthew Needham as the semi-dislocated abuser
and in particular for Aisling Loftus as Anne; her protests ineffective,
she retreats into dissociation, which is not a helpful state for a
drama’s viewpoint character. Crimp, of course, doesn’t want simple
emotional engagement from us, but active interrogation. I’m afraid,
though, that the first question now is “What’s the big deal about these
callous attitudes?” Even as we indict ourselves by asking, it remains
unanswered.
Written for the Financial
Times.