In all the tenth anniversary acknowledgements of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York - one has to avoid writing ‘celebrations’, though the tone sometimes seemed like that – a particularly ambitious event has stood out, at least on this side of the Pond. Rupert Goold is the most successful theatre director of his generation and he has had the inspiring idea of recruiting 19 writers from both America and Britain to write scenes in a sprawling narrative, which he has staged with top-notch actors in a site-specific setting at Commodity Quay, St. Katharine Dock, near Tower Bridge.
Decade is not quite a play, though Goold almost makes it seem like one as he interweaves scenes, allowing us to return to the same characters from time to time, notably three widows of victims in the two towers who we trace backwards through their annual reunions to the year before 9/11 when they first got together, all bright eyed and bushy-tailed about their futures. What struck me overwhelmingly in this high-aspiring production, however, was the difficulty that even the most experienced dramatists involved had in finding a language or form that sufficiently measured up to the scale of the project.
It was difficult, because of the inadequately explanatory programme notes, to tell precisely who wrote what bits, but as Simon Schama was one of the contributors,known of course as a historian rather than as a playwright, it was reasonable to assume that he had written the scene responding to the question of whether 9/11 was a truly historic event of monumental importance, or something which real history will come to see as a ripple on the surface. The fact that Schama evaded a clear answer may reflect the difficulty which all the writers had in saying anything particularly memorable about what had happened. Indeed, there was an innate trivialisation in some scenes, only prevented by the scale of the enterprise as a whole. For me the question always in my mind as I watched was whether we are still too close to the circumstances of that terrible day to see it with the same clarity of vision that onlookers had when two planes flew out of a clear blue sky to hit the symbolic fulcrum of American capitalism. It took at least ten years before Erich Maria Remarque, Robert Graves and R.C. Sherriff were able to begin to make sense of the First World War. Perhaps we need more than that before 9/11 can speak clearly to us.
I was very struck in Decade by the more documentary pieces. The most vivid account of what happened is given by an onlooker who should have been at work that day in one of the towers but who opted not to go in and saw instead from a nearby window what was happening. As we so often find when ordinary people are interviewed on television and asked to describe an extraordinary event in which they have unexpectedly been caught up, people find graphic words for horrific or momentous events. Ask them the day before to talk about their work or their family and the result might be exquisitely banal, but in the aftermath of a big unique moment they are like poets. Decade came most alive when ‘real’ people were being depicted. Among them are Obama and Osama. I won’t have been the only person astonished by the proximity of their registers of language, both appealing to natural justice, to the protection of the Almighty and to love of nation. ‘O, the difference of man and man!’ says Goneril in King Lear. What a difference between the letter ‘b’ and the letter ’s’ in a name, and yet how alike the two men are in rhetoric, though putting it to different ends.
Cumberland Lodge was set up in 1947 to provide the opportunity for discussions that would help to ensure the preservation of peace after the catastrophe of a second world war. We are dedicated still to that, so it is important to us to try to make sense of what took place on 11th September 2001. Decade shows some of the problems of doing that, though one hugely applauds the attempt. The situation was not helped by the misapplication of the word ‘war’ by almost everyone involved in the crisis that followed. Crime and war are not the same thing. By dignifying as war the vast crime of murder and destruction wrought by the terrorists that day a false glamour and heroism was bestowed on them. We are still paying for this. Decade will not go down in history, even theatrical history, as a great event (how much more compelling was a recent revival of Journey’s End, set in the battlefields of Flanders nearly a hundred years ago). I am indebted to it, however, for making me think anew about the world we have inherited after 9/11 and in particular for reminding me that there are some aspects of human life which elude understanding until long after they have ceased to be in the headlines.
Alastair Niven
