Rupert Goold and his company Headlong have never run short on ambition. Cataclysmic, divisive narratives, especially those that loom large in today’s America, are their starting points. As director of Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London and the phenomenally successful ENRON by Lucy Prebble (reviewed by Prospect's Michael Coveney here), Goold has shown an alchemical knack for engaging audiences with complex, recondite subject matter. Yet his latest offering, Decade—an immersive theatrical experience based on 9/11, set in a Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center’s North Tower–comes with its own peculiar liabilities. On paper, it doesn’t so much ring alarm bells as set off air raid sirens.
Cultural depictions of 9/11 have, understandably, been oblique for the most part, even muted. It wasn’t until 2006, with Paul Greengrass’s excellent film United 93 and Oliver Stone’s less excellent World Trade Center that the day’s traumatic events were recreated by Hollywood with any attempt at veracity. And that despite the self-consciously cinematic spectacle of the attacks, a grotesque reflection of America’s blockbusting film franchises. For much of the country the subject remains raw, the losses deeply felt.
Headlong’s problem, then, is twofold. Firstly the translation of such a screen-ready tragedy to a theatrical setting runs the risk of being flat or risible. Secondly, the exploitation of a recent, lived tragedy for the entertainment of comfortable theatre-goers on a night out might suggest a new level of offensive kitsch. Thankfully, the production avoids these pitfalls by consciously steering in the opposite direction. The play’s narrative does not build up to the expected climax—as the narrative in Titanic does, for instance. Instead, the explosions we have all already seen on our TV screens happen early on, to visceral but not shocking effect. As the name suggests, the show is about the legacy of the event, not the drama of its fracturing moments.
Goold’s creative team offers us something more multi-layered and courageous in its political scope. This is a writhing hydra of a show, comprising short pieces from a host of celebrated and rising writers, including Abi Morgan, Alecky Blythe, Lynn Nottage and John Logan. The actors glide around the theatre space like phantoms, whether performing on the central platform or stepping onto audience members’ dining tables. They play off and against each other in pieces of varying tone and energy, linked by Scott Ambler’s sinuous, sinister choreography. They move, dance, sing and act, in characteristically jarring tempo, and in an impressive array of accents that capture racial and geographical flavours with precision—Arinze Kene and Charlotte Randle are particularly deserving of praise here.
The writers’ voices are distinct and divergent, but most bring to light unpalatable repercussions of 9/11 on the personal and international level. Goold’s old collaborator Mike Bartlett, echoing Martin Crimp, contributes an insidious, disorienting piece of verbal pinball, drawing skilful displays from his actors, particularly Kevin Harvey. Meanwhile, Jonathan Bonnici catches the audience between laughter and shock in his portrayal of a Twin Towers gift shop worker, who blithely exploits the psychology of trauma to seduce female customers in a vignette by Ella Hickson. The backbone of the production is a series of lunches, held by three widows to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; we see their meetings in reverse chronological order, peeling back the decade’s quiet agonies of grief and guilt.
“We need to take what happens to the heart into the head” implores Tom Hodgkins, in a monologue written by Simon Schama. Under Goold’s intelligent, carefully weighted direction these pieces bravely eschew the theatrics of emergency, in order that we reflect dispassionately on the complex fallout of 9/11. If we are to learn lessons from that disaster—and there is no guarantee that we will—we must be guided by sensitivity of intellect, not by knee-jerk responses. For recognising and exposing this truth, Decade deserves attention as much as applause.
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