Theatre - A play that does not cater for Thatcherite chauvinist pigs. By Michael Portillo Attempts on Her Life Diorama Arts Centre, London NW1

''This play being about hysteria [simper], the actors have been under a lot of emotional strain [sniff] and a couple of days ago I lost a couple of them [clearing of throat]. I am the director and will take one of the parts [nervous laugh]. Oh, and the projector has gone wrong, so I will announce the things that would have been projected on to the set [blink]." The delivery of these sentences was so ingenuous that I mistook them for the scripted opening lines of the play and, may I be forgiven, thought the idea of actors being too hysterical to perform rather witty. But evidently this really was the director, Biba Lille-West, breaking the sad news that Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life had had to be hurriedly adapted for fewer voices.

Because the author's text has no named characters, nor bears any indication of how to assign the speeches, reallocating them - while certainly a challenge for the actors - could not be considered an artistic disaster.

The play got under way with each of the women in the all-female cast one by one spreading herself out on a large beanbag centre stage, writhing upon it, sometimes breaking off to vomit, and raving incoherently, apparently leaving messages on an answering machine. (Had the projector been working, it would, critically, have displayed the time of each message.) "The trees have names. One of them is hurt." "You're going to suck my cock."

It is at times like these that I am not sure I was born to be theatre critic of the New Statesman. At a guess, there was some highly important feminist stuff going on here, and I admit that it was going right over my Thatcherite white male chauvinist pig's head.

As though the actors had read my thoughts, the next scene ("the Tragedy of Love and Ideology") involved a girl called Annie making love, maybe on Vienna's Ringstrasse ("which made such an impression on Adolf Hitler"), with one who during intercourse lets out "the sensitive grunt of a man of power and authority". A look of doubt crosses her face and turns to anger when he, while still in bed, answers the telephone to his political master, who "destroyed society" in the name of things such as enterprise and choice. The play was written in 1997.

I confess. I, too, find the Ringstrasse impressive. Until I saw this play, I'd had no idea what a serious thought crime I was committing. I, too, like to think that all my grunts are sensitive.

In the following scene, the women gathered in a circle and talked about the trees' names again, and about rape and the disembowelling of children. This was accompanied by maniacal rubbing of KitKats (released from their silver paper) over their faces. Maybe this scene referred to genocide, because it also described the sadistic killing of people buried up to their necks and having their skulls smashed.

By now, it was becoming clear that Annie could be many things. We were viewing different aspects of her personality. Still, it came as a surprise when, in a scene called "The New Annie", she became a car, with "electric windows fitted as standard". We were told this first in Japanese and then in English. I was reminded of those political focus groups which are asked to think: if the Tory party were a car, what sort would it be? "Without wheels, propped up on bricks in the front garden," they say, and other disobliging things of the sort. Anyway, the important thing about Annie as a car was that "there are no filthy gypsies in Annie or in the sunlit country through which she drives", so I suppose this was biting satire and social commentary.

The play involves a certain amount of dressing up, and down. The women donned sheets for a rather good song called "The Camera Loves You", sung well by Birshen Kemal. If it were not so loathsomely politically incorrect to do so, I would mention that she is very beautiful - but given that it would be, I had better not. In another scene, most of the women stripped down to very modest and very clean white underwear, and each of them was sponged by others while standing in a bowl. Perhaps we were now in a lunatic asylum (in the play, I mean).

Kemal gave us a second song, the best thing in the show, which brought the different parts of Annie together: she is variously a killer, a brand-new car, a refugee in a horse and cart, the cause of the Trojan war and the end of life. The latter referred to an argument between the actors over a work of art of the Tracey Emin school that displayed, spread out on a bloodstained sheet, artefacts involved in a suicide.

Memo to editor: I am not cut out for this sort of thing. Memo to self: I won- der whether the missing actors really were overcome by emotion. Perhaps they just did not want this turkey on their curriculum vitae.

Booking on 020 7630 9195 until 7 November

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