A collection of different responses to 9/11 create a very human picture, says Catherine Love.
“Sometimes the big picture is a scrapbook of snapshots.” So says one of the vast collection of characters in Decade, a site-specific response to 9/11 from Rupert Goold and Headlong. Unafraid to encompass perspectives from all sides, Decade recognises that the legacy of this world-changing event lies in a variety of different responses.
The show takes place in a warehouse in St Katharine Docks, a room decked out as the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre, with vast windows looking out on the blue sky over Manhattan and audience members seated at tables with the fifteen-strong cast weaving between them.
Goold has recruited nineteen different writers to create the multiplicity of responses that are presented by the uniformly excellent cast in this engaging space; it's a wide breadth of opinion that perhaps inevitably leads to a certain amount of choppiness. Goold painstakingly weaves these various strands together and is assisted by recurring elements, like the yearly meeting of the 9/11 widows which acts as the gravitational force that holds these diverse scenes together.
Scott Ambler's choreography also acts as a mode of transition between the many miniature plays, managing to create potent visual images without being offensively showy. That said, the relevance of the movement is not always entirely convincing.
Another inevitable consequence of getting such an array of writers on board is that styles differ and have the potential to clash. Verbatim theatre – an interesting piece clearly from Alecky Blythe which features interviews with British Muslims – rubs shoulders with abstract symbolism, while documentary realism is juxtaposed with fictional stories. In any other piece of theatre this cacophony of different voices and over-reaching questions would be a fatal flaw, but for this subject matter it strikes the right balance. Goold has wisely sidestepped the contentious path of imposing one over-arching meaning on these events and has instead invited voices from various angles. He even provides the bold perspective of those for whom such an act of terrorism seemed to be a reasonable act of revenge.
Decade is necessarily ambitious, but not inappropriately so. The recurrence of the adjectives 'immersive' and 'site-specific' in Headlong's publicity material sets alarm bells ringing, conjuring obscene reconstructions of rubble and ash, but Goold has respectfully refrained from focusing too closely on the event itself. Instead this is a patchwork of responses, a tapestry of the different ways in which people cope with disaster. Some scenes admittedly work better than others and the show is not without flaws; when the tone of the piece becomes needlessly pointed, such as in Simon Schama's lecture-style monologue, it starts to tip the delicate balance of subtlety, sensitivity and complexity that it is careful to establish.
This is not a radical departure from previous dramatic responses to 9/11 in that it still predominantly picks up on individual stories played out against the vast backdrop of the World Trade Centre attacks, but the innovation that Headlong have introduced is the attempt to gather all these stories together in one piece. Composed of fragments but not fragmentary, the tone and texture of the piece are beautifully represented when the texts of those caught up in the attack are set to Adam Cork's haunting music; as the layers of sound and voices build and overlap, what emerges loudest is an overwhelmingly human message.
Decade runs at Commodity Quay until 15 October.
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