Decade

‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ wrote Theodor Adorno in his 1949 essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. He wrote those words, of course, in the immediate aftermath of the moment those camps revealed their nightmarish secrets to the world.  What did he mean by that? For Adorno, I think, Auschwitz seemed to be an absolute event, a moment when the processes of inhumane rationalisation slipped their bounds and took their leave of humanity absolutely. It was an event of terrible finality and totality. There was no gap in it, no edge, nothing that poetry could use to question it, open it up, make it strange again. To write poetry would simply be, therefore, to duplicate and repeat the event; it risks, as Adorno said of Schoenberg’s Survivors of Warsaw, making ‘the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of its horror removed’. And to do that, of course, is barbaric.

There’s been a wave of Adornoism in British theatre. David Hare writes in one of his lectures of feeling a sense of embarrassment and disappointment at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem finding that the photographs of the camps were much more powerful than artworks inspired by them. All the artworks did, thought Hare, was ‘to insert an artist’s presence gratuitously between people’s unbearable suffering and our own reaction to it’. While Hare’s objection is to artistic interpretation rather than finding anything uniquely unrepresentable about the Holocaust, he reflects a widespread sense that fiction, poetry, art cannot or should not represent the world. One theatrical response is David Hare’s own: in work like Berlin, Wall and Via Dolorosa he presents his experiences in his own voice, performing these monologues himself. Another might be some forms of verbatim theatre which try very hard not to ‘insert an artist’s presence’ between the audience and the subject matter.

The events of 9/11 were not comparable in scale to those of the Holocaust, but they was an act of grotesque, spectacular murder and the sudden simultaneous deaths of so many pose related ethical problems. A day or two after the day, Channel 4 News opened with a fast-cut compilation of footage showing the second plane hitting the South tower. It was an horrific sequence, powerful but misjudged; it seemed as if the editor had wanted to emphasise the dramatic nature of the events, as if these events needed such emphasis, and so had inserted him or herself into the material. A few days later, images of the attacks disappeared from our screens. There was a tacit agreement among broadcasters to step back from disaster porn, not to force the bereaved and the affected to relive these events before their eyes. The ethics of this are complicated by the spectacular politics of the acts, in a way that takes us back to Adorno: one aim of the terrorists was to create terrible iconic images, to shock visually, so to repeat these images is to be complicit in the terrorism. To show images of the falling towers is, in a sense, barbaric.

9/11 then has two prohibitions against it. The distaste for fiction as a response to suffering and the distaste for documentary. Headlong’s Decade responds to this double-taboo in a new piece that may be considered an attempt to pick a path through the ethical minefield of representing 9/11. Director Rupert Goold wanted to create a large-scale theatre piece that would look at 9/11 the years on and reflect on the decade that those events so decisively shaped. Sensing perhaps that those events could or should not be directly represented - quite apart from the ethical prohibitions I’ve discussed, the theatre’s means of representation would be inadequate to any kind of literal representation of these literally enormous attacks - Goold asked twenty writers to give him short pieces which he would stitch together into a theatrical tapestry. The idea was, I guess, that the tumult of styles, modes, genres and languages would create a kind of kaleidoscope, refracting the event multiply and not privileging any one viewpoint or make any definitive claim to how to represent 9/11. In addition, the profusion of scenes suggest the complexity of the events, its many international dimensions, layers, meanings and experiences. Perhaps in an additionally anti-theatrical gesture, the performance took place in an office block near Tower Bridge. The audience entered through a mock-up of US Customs and then took their seats in what I think was intended to be a replica of Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. We watched scenes performed on a large circular central table, sometimes at or on the tables around the space; other scenes took place above us, behind glass, in a disused corridor space. At moment we seemed to catch glimpses of helpless figures trapped in the towers, staring uncomprehendingly down from the windows.

Did it work? Not for me. There were some strong pieces from Sam Adamson, Ella Hickson, Alecky Blythe and DC Moore. The variety of scenes seemed awkward as we lurched from one thought to another. The lack of any overall coherence meant that each scene stood on its own, intellectually, emotionally, and didn’t benefit from any kind of cumulative development. Some of the scenes were sentimental (The Sentinels, for example) and rubbed up against scenes that were abrasively funky (The Enemy). Some ideas really needed to be given space to work on their own terms and got smothered by the stuff around it (Trio with Accompaniment, My Name is Tania Head). Some ideas were rather earnest (The Odds) or rather assumed the emotional contents that they were striving to convey (Black Girl Gone). In most cases, the writing is fine, even good, but the effect of the writing has been disturbed, worsened by the unsympathetic dramaturgy.

What do I mean by that? Well, the published playtext reveals that several of the scenes were completely cut (Abi Morgan’s scene, a rather good, punchy, funny piece about journalism, called Superman; Adam Brace’s Electric Things, imagines a view of 9/11 from the other side of the world, for example). Other scenes have been cut very brutally with considerable damage to their integrity. Take one of the most successful pieces, Sam Adamson’s Recollections of Scott Forbes. It’s a verbatim - I think - piece about someone who worked in the South Tower and it follows his recollections of the event, his near-miss in having swapped his shifts, his speculation about the event, and his drift into conspiracy theory. This has survived, as far as I remember, uncut, but Goold has divided the piece in two and placed the two sections separately. What this does is to place much more emphasis on Forbes’s conspiracy theories. In one long rush we can connect his desperate seeking for explanation in the trauma of the initial revelations; separated out, the conspiracy material feels cooler and more reasoned; it seems endorsed by the production, where Adamson’s text is much more ambivalent.

I’m afraid I think the fault lies squarely with Rupert Goold. There is something intellectually rigorous and ethically sophisticated about proliferating the story, splintering it into a number of different strands. In this instance, though, it seems to be a way of disempowering the writer and installing Goold as the author-God, deciding who lives and dies. There’s a fair amount of this around - Theatre503 specialises in a form of theatrical evening where a group of writers write very short pieces which are collaged together. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but what they tend to mean is that the writers don’t get paid. This is not an anti-director rant. There’s nothing wrong with a piece of work where the director radically intervenes in a text and, as my first few paragraphs should make clear, I think there are plausible political and ethical arguments for the form in which this show was put together. It is demanding on a director, requiring the very highest creative, intellectual, emotional sensitivity. To make this work you need to have terrific artistic taste.

But, from the evidence of this, Goold doesn’t have good enough taste to make a project like this work. First, there is, as I’ve suggested, no real sense of the whole thing so everything is diminished: Decade seems to me less than the sum of its parts. Second, the idea that we can’t show 9/11 is compromised with a flurry of airplane noises and other representations, which seemed to be tacky and sensationalist. Third, there are moments in the show that seem to me in breathtakingly bad taste. I don’t mind being offended in the theatre and actually rather enjoy my sensitivities being tested and taken to the edge. But the ‘flight safety demonstration’ dance that opened the second half seemed to me offensive not because it broke a taboo but because it did so thoughtlessly, smugly, and appeared to believe it was doing something clever and edgy. Fourth, there were half a dozen redundant, half-hearted, malformed ideas in the show. Why did we have to go through customs to get in? What was that saying? You didn’t have to go through customs to get into the WTC. And when the actors ask these searching questions, we didn’t have to answer, so it all felt like we were letting them pretend to be intimidating; I was embarrassed on their behalf. Fifth, lots of the scenes came off badly because Goold seemed more interested in distracting the audience with some wacky staging idea than in working with the actors to find a clear path through the truth of the material. There were loads of different acting styles in this show - and not in some interesting, clashy, cabaret style: it just looked like no one had thought it important to unify the show artistically in any way. Worse still, the overall effect was to imply that the show was extremely pleased with itself. Goold, the artist, has removed the writer’s artistic control, only to more forcefully insert himself between the audience and the material.

What perhaps starts as an evasion of the risk of become implicit in the horror of 9/11 ends, it seems to me, in self-congratulatory directorial smugness, which is in itself crasser than any of the mistakes that might have been made otherwise. Because, what’s less often remembered is that Adorno didn’t stick to his principled opposition to art after Auschwitz. In 1962, in his essay ‘Commitment’ he reaffirmed his view but, with dialectical fastidiousness, also affirmed the opposite: ‘suffering [...] demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids’. By the time he published Negative Dialectics in 1966 in he had moved even further to the latter position: ‘perennial suffering has as much right to express itself as the martyr has to scream; this is why it may have been wrong to say that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz’.

And this must be right. I am appalled by the failure of nerve that considers certain events too serious for theatrical representation, too serious for art. Nothing is too serious or too difficult for art. It may be too difficult for certain artists and we may baulk at the challenge represented by some world-historical atrocity, but if art isn’t prepared to take on the most difficult and thorny of subjects, what is? To make bad theatre after Auschwitz is grotesque. Not to make art at all is barbaric.