The Stage

Decade

Published Friday 9 September 2011 at 11:13 by Mark Shenton

London has had its own World Trade Centre buildings - one, located at Canary Wharf, was badly damaged not by Al-Qaeda but by an IRA bomb blast in 1996, five years ahead of 9/11 and subsequently vacated before its steel frame was re-clad and turned into a Hilton Hotel - and another near Tower Bridge, next door in fact to Commodity Quay at St Katharine’s Dock where Rupert Goold’s Headlong company have now turned a long atrium-like room into a simulacrum of the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the WTC in New York.

Tobias Menzies, Amy Lennox and Cat Simmons in Decade at Commodity Quay, St Katharine's Dock, London Photo: Tristram Kenton

Even as our newspapers are being saturated by first-hand testimonies of what happened on 9/11 and its repercussions as the tenth anniversary approaches, Goold’s amazing, resonant project stitches together a tapestry of stories from a team of 19 leading writers to create an urgent, bold, terrifying and unique theatrical account of it.

You feel eerily like you might be inside the Windows on the World itself, seated at large round tables - which the actors sometimes stand and even dance on - or banquettes ranged around the walls, with the large white ribs of the building’s structure opening out at either end of the room to panoramic vistas of New York. It’s another environmental design triumph for Miriam Buether, and Goold and his choreographer Scott Ambler animate it with a constantly flowing parade of movement, at its most extraordinary right at the beginning as people trapped inside the building claw at the windows on an upper level to the space.

But Goold, who conceived and developed the piece with Robert Icke, has also done something even more remarkable - to create something fluid, seamless and gripping out of the disparate work of so many different writers so that there’s actually a sense of narrative, especially as told via a group of widows who meet at a coffee shop on the anniversary of the attack every year.

Most moving is the first person narrative of a British man Scott Forbes, who worked in one of the Towers and lived across the river in Jersey City in an apartment that had a view of it, but had the day off on the day of the attack. As edited by Samuel Adamson and beautifully played by Tobias Menzies, this is simple, direct and affecting. Mike Bartlett’s Mamet-like exchange between two men talking about how it affected them has a powerful staccato verve. Alecky Blythe employs her usual technique of recording conversations she has with people - in this case, from various London mosques- and after editing them, has actors recite them in precisely the same rhythms as their speakers originally delivered them.

That gives a flavour of some of the divergent techniques adopted to tell these stories here, and it is a tribute to Goold’s experimental brilliance to bring them together so successfully, as it is to his superb ensemble cast in bringing them to such acute and piercing life.