September 11. As soon as the date is mentioned everyone over about seventeen will have their own personal response. Some of those responses are very private and some have been made very public, but for most of us the world changed that day. Ten years on from the Twin Towers most of us have read and heard thousands of words on the events of that day, and probably seen thousands of images also. So a decade on what does it all mean?
Decade, written collaboratively by a team of writers and thinkers, and presented by
Headlong Theatre, asks that question.
This is a site specific work. Headlong has turned a former trading hall in St. Katharine Docks into downtown Manhattan in order to re-immerse you in the feelings of
Those moments on
That day. And more writers than actors have been involved with the creation of this work, nineteen versus twelve. Different writers have been responsible for different characters. There are the three widows getting together to remember in a coffee shop, local store owners experiencing racially motivated mistrust bordering on hatred in the aftermath, Lynndie England, convicted of torture at Abu Ghraib, designing her book cover, the office worker suspicious of a 'power-down' on the preceding day, a quick fire interview with the man who shot Osama Bin Laden, a woman who cancelled an abortion and a hysterical 'pretend' victim. Among others. The action jumps around from place to place, but all of it plays backwards to the events on September 11, 2001.
Decade reads as if it's going to be a hard piece of theatre to sit through, but it's held together by the interludes of movement which Director,
Rupert Goold, used previously and successfully in
Enron to segue from challenging scene to challenging scene. So if you want to mark the occasion this is a good, and thought provoking, way to do it.
