Theatre is preparing to mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks, but are 9/11 plays still provocative?
There is nothing quite as dramatic as a catastrophe. Tragedy and atrocity have always gone hand in hand with creativity, inspiring some of the world's greatest plays. As we approach the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, are plays written in response to this disaster addressing the important and sometimes uncomfortable issues that need to be confronted?
Ten years and countless dramatisations on from the event, it would seem that 9/11 is no longer the emotionally raw topic that it was in the immediate aftermath. With new responses constantly cropping up, it's hardly controversial to write a play inspired by the event, but the plays that reach our stages rarely address the tragedy head on. What these responses share instead, is a close-up, individual focus on the event, as seen in plays such as Anne Nelson's The Guys, Neil LaBute's The Mercy Seat and Brian Sloan's WTC View, but one new production looks set to break the mould.
Decade, an ambitious site-specific project from Rupert Goold's company Headlong, examines the legacy of this world-altering event through responses from a collection of different writers. Just when we seem to have left controversy behind, such a far-reaching view of the disaster may re-address polemical issues head on and get to the sensitive heart of what still needs addressing in our response to this tragedy.
In contrast to the wide angle of Decade, Islington's Pleasance Theatre is reviving LaBute's The Mercy Seat, an intimate two-hander about an adulterous couple who consider using the World Trade Centre attacks as a cover-up to run away together. While LaBute's play avoids the thorny issue of the event itself, it controversially exposes the disturbingly selfish and opportunistic responses of some Americans at a time when the nation appeared to be united by tragedy. Director Rob Watt admits, however, that 9/11 is more of a platform than a centrepiece and that “any national disaster could have been the backdrop for this”.
He goes on to say: “Theatre gives a forum for its community to voice an opinion, a perspective; whether people like that perspective or not. I think it's important that it's there.” As Watt suggests, it is crucial that theatre asks the tough questions, no matter how difficult. Brian Sloan, the writer of WTC View, firmly stated in an interview with the New York Times that “you cannot write a play about 9/11”, but now that the lapsed years have provided some distance it is vital to at least attempt it. The question should not be can we write about this? But rather how do we write about this? Goold takes a similar line, telling the Evening Standard that, despite any reservations he may have, “theatre has to address this sort of thing”.
While The Mercy Seat asks searching and uncomfortable questions about the darker side of human nature in response to such disasters, it fails to contribute to our wider understanding of the legacy of 9/11 and its impact, something that the contrasting approach of Decade might just achieve.
In writing about a subject such as this, however, sensitivity is an overriding consideration and the hope is that the writers recruited by Goold will produce a respectful range of pieces that reflect the myriad of different responses to this event. It may be, as Goold insists, that theatre has to address these issues, but it is in the way in which they address them that Headlong have to tread carefully.
Decade runs at Commodity Quay from 1 September - 15 October.
Other 9/11 plays on in London to mark the anniversary include The Mercy Seat at Pleasance Theatre and Manifest Destiny at The King's Head Theatre.
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