Theatre and history: Decade and 9/11

Museums, as institutions of public memory, fail for the most part to engage with contemporary perspectives on history. In trying to understand why this is the case, I was fascinated to go to the theatre – actually, to a disused conference hall in an office block in Katherine’s Dock in east London, a short walk from Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.

Decade – headlined “Two towers. Ten years. Thousands of opinions” – presents a selection of scripts by 19 playwrights, produced by Headlong Theatre, directed by Rupert Goold. The world premiere welcomes the audience through a security check which resembles an airport lounge – body scanner gates and bag checks with US uniformed guards. This is truly site specific theatre.

Once past the interrogation, we were shown to a red carpet area where waitresses clutching clipboards showed us to our tables – exactly like an expensive American resaurant – the World Trade Centre’s Windows on the World.

Weirdly, they greeted us with a too bright “Good morning” which chilled me to my bones. Menus on each table “Welcome to America’s most famous and highest grossing restaurant” are themed to include prices for the breakfast offerings – omelettes, seasonal berries and papaya, griddle cakes with butter and maple syrup – as well as information on the restaurant itself: The boundless landscapes seen from the towers inspired the thinking and planning of the menus. The stage set is incredibly convincing, and unsettling – the views are indeed boundless, and recall convincingly those bright sprakling blue skies of New York that infamous day.

This is strong theatre. The production is intense, well choreographed, fast moving. It blends dance routines with slow motion movement sequences, and spans different writing techniques and styles harmoniously. The acting is variable, but the tension is constant. We time travel back 10 years, with the annual memorial day get-together of 3 widows over coffee helping to pace the calendar for the audience and providing an anchor for the other episodes on stage.

This is a strong interpretation of history. I know of no museum or interpretation centre which reflects on the impact of 9/11 in quite such a sweeping manner, allowing reflection, criticism, alternative viewpoints, dialogue, interpretations. If possible for theatre, why do museums find it so difficult to reflect in a similar open ended way?

I have come to the conclusion that often, although peculiarly well positioned to help reflecting on and critiquing history, museums are stuck in their interpretations because they focus on their collections – sometimes exclusively so. The material history they preserve seems to stifle their capacity for new interpretations. They fail to make that all important leap to writing the history of the big picture, considering their collections only tangentially.

This is what I herald in terms of narrative museums. This is a strong interpretative lesson: do not think about what collections can do for you, but what you can do with the collections. In other words: think what you want to say, not what the collections can say. Only then, extrapolate how best to say that using them.