First Night: Attempts On Her Life, National Theatre, London

How to sum up Attempts on her Life? Perhaps it is an attempt, as suggested by one of its nameless speakers, at a play for a world "in which theatre itself has died", where the "outmoded conventions of dialogue and so-called characters" are done away with, leaving something fragmented and enigmatic in their place.

Martin Crimp's play eschews easy interpretations in any case, presenting "17 scenarios for the theatre" in which contradictory accounts are given of a central character who never appears. The absent Anne is depicted as a porn star, a terrorist, a modern artist, a refugee and a new make of car. The play, which made Crimp's name and led the late Sarah Kane to call him her favourite writer, premiered at the Royal Court in 1997.

Ten years later, as it is given its first major revival, kicking off the Travelex £10 season at the National, its themes seem ever more pertinent as the shadowy Anne allows Crimp to flit between ideas of sex and abuse, genocide and terrorism and the unassailable twin towers of consumer and celebrity culture.

Katie Mitchell - a long-time collaborator of the playwright, having most recently directed The Seagull at the National- takes up the challenge of Crimp's script.

An "open text", it refuses to assign lines to specific characters and notes only that it should be played by "a company of actors". It's a dream ticket for Mitchell, a keen practitioner of director's theatre. And she really goes to town here, dealing with the play's transfer from its original intimate setting to the cavernous Lyttleton stage with a large cast of 11, all kitted out with face microphones and cameras.

In this hugely ambitious production, the action is entirely played out on screens above the stage. On to these are projected the movements and speeches of the cast in a huge variety of filming techniques - noirish close-ups of the feet of a murder victim morph into overlit television commercials and grainy police videos.

In many cases this video work is spectacular and effectively evokes a society in which life is lived through a lens and every action is filtered by the media. But Crimp's clever-clever writing is often submerged in the whirl of camera-work and pastiches of the X Files and Nineties music which make up Mitchell's vision. This is a shame as perhaps the key to the play is its revelling in language which sees Crimp turn his hand to a variety of genres, like a theatrical version of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. Some work better than others in this production.

Anne, who makes her repeated attempted suicides the subject of her art - which is discussed by Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin look-alikes on Newsnight Review, is particularly effective, as is the car advertisement which promises a better way of life and a humorous take-off of a gritty detective interrogation scene.

But, by the end of two hours of close-ups, I began to crave some human warmth from the stage, rather than just scurrying around setting up cameras.

At times this piece about the spiritual vacuum at the heart of Nineties, and now Noughties society, felt just like an art installation - slick, chilly and a little shallow. But, then again, perhaps that was the point.