All Rupert Goold's productions are like a high wire act. Mostly they reach the other side unscathed amid deafening applause, and occasionally they plunge to earth. This site-specific work, balancing precariously over the tricky territory of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, is probably the most difficult story the director has ever had to tell, but I'm happy to say that despite the occasional wobble, he brings it off.
Headlong, Goold's company, has never launched itself into such risky territory before. Earthquakes in London was similar in style but far less controversial in its subject matter. With Enron, the show this most resembles in its American theme, the story was essentially over by the time Goold and his brilliant writer Lucy Prebble put it on stage. And there weren't too many Enron supporters out there to be offended, or dead victims to be mourned. It was only about money, after all. But the attack on the Twin Towers isn't over; there are thousands of bereaved families still mourning the victims, and we still have our 'boots on the ground' in Afghanistan as a result. The initial images of planes flying into skyscrapers on a sunny morning are crystal clear in everybody's mind, but the final outcomes are still hidden in the fog of history. In New York, every victim has been finally accounted for, but in Iraq, invaded and occupied as the result of a revenge attack which would never have been launched without 9/11, the final toll is is in the hundreds of thousands and is still mounting.
Goold has assembled a team of nearly 20 writers from both sides of the Atlantic to contribute to this production, but it's not clear who is responsible for writing what. My hunch is that the American contributors, who include such stellar names as Lynn Nottage, are responsible for the best parts because they are closest to what happened. There's a wide gulf between the strongest and the weakest writing on offer, though Goold has done well to stitch together a coherent structure from his disparate material. The best scenes by far involve three women who have all lost their husbands in the attack, who meet every September 11 in the same coffee shop. Emma Fielding is the senior of the trio, dignified and faithful in accepting her widowhood, Amy Lennox is the young bubbly blonde who puts the tragedy behind her by marrying again and getting pregnant, while Charlotte Randle plays a damaged woman locked in a cycle of anger and conflict with her fatherless children. Their story is told backwards, from the moment Lennox's character triumphantly proclaims 'I'm not a widow any more' and Fielding replies icily 'You'll always be a widow'. That crisp exchange exemplifies the best of the script; but there are one or two scenes which really don't work at all, including one set in Pakistan after the killing of Benazir Bhutto and another invented conversation involving a US Navy Seal who shot Osama Bin Laden. Some of the scenes are verbatim transcripts -- one of the writers, Alecky Blythe, is an expert in this form of theatrical journalism in which 'his words are spoken by an actor' becomes a substitute for dramatic action.
Dramatic action is Goold's forte, and though he has a tendency to keep his actors in a state of demented perpetual motion like Duracell bunnies, there are some moments of real theatrical genius. The impact is similar to the rail crash in Max Stafford-Clark's memorable National Theatre production of The Permanent Way more than a decade ago. At the end of Decade, as the clock winds inexorably backwards into September 2000, the three women stand together waiting for their husbands, who finally appear, laughing and boisterous, behind a glass wall and out of reach as the women stretch out their arms. It's the kind of wordless image that only lasts a second or two but is more powerful than several pages of dialogue.
Some of the characters burst through the brevity of the short dramatic scenes and into full life; Jonathan Bonnici plays a New York Arab shopkeeper with a family back home in Yemen who can't understand why someone has put a brick through his window. Cat Simmons plays a girl who turns up to have an abortion on the morning of 9/11, only to find the operation interrupted when the surgeon and the nurse switch on the TV news. Bonnici plays a hustling Panamanian souvenir-seller at Ground Zero who borrows lines of dialogue about 'measuring my life by heartbeats' from a bereaved woman tour guide to hit on his tearful female customers. Emma Fielding plays a desperately speed dating 42-year-old woman whose skin is disintegrating with acute eczema; her real trauma, revealed only in throwaway form, is that she survived the Twin Towers by going on a coffee run at the crucial moment.
The key to the successful impact of this production lies not so much in the scripts or even the excellent acting, but in the site-specific concept and the choice of venue. The audience enters a modern office block near the Tower of London, queues under a series of warning signs about explosive substances and transportation safety before passing through a metal detector and running the gauntlet of a series of less-than-friendly immigration guards in uniform. The performance space itself, designed by Miriam Buether, is a large rectangle which appears to have giant windows at either end giving views over the Hudson River and New York. There's an upper gallery, running the length of the room and glassed in, which provides an effective platform for some scenes. The scene is the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, and it's breakfast time in the Windows on the World restaurant. The maitre d' (Charlotte Randle again) welcomes the audience with a breezy 'Good morning and how are you today? How many in your party?' We wait to be seated at round tables, complete with breakfast menus -- 'Griddle Cakes with Butter and Maple Syrup $7.00' . The last man to enter isn't a theatregoer, but a barefooted Islamic terrorist, played by Kevin Harvey. Randle asks if he has a reservation, and starts to read a long alphabetical list; these, we realise, are not restaurant customers but the pulverised victims of 9/11. As the voice fades, the terrorist picks up a menu, folds it into a paper aeroplane, and throws it into the audience. The lights go out, and there's a huge explosion.
This is a production that is always respectful to the victims and is careful -- perhaps too careful -- not to offend. George W Bush doesn't appear, which is a strange omission, and the New York Fire Department heroes get only walk-on parts, while Barack Obama and Osama Bin Laden speak in their own words. The work at its best in the scenes which focus tightly on the reality of New York and its people, but the problem with 9/11 is that there is a much wider story to tell. Simon Schama's elegantly written contribution admits that historical perspective is hard to achieve, and calls for America to be 'militantly tolerant' towards other religions including Islam, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson. This makes perfect sense, but the historical meaning of 9/11 still remains elusive, and it's possible that a theatre company based in Fallujah might have a different take on it altogether.
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