9/11
Matt Wolf
Against the grimmest of backdrops, generosity and even grace can be possible. That's the eternally uplifting message of Come From Away, the surprise Broadway musical hit about the community that was taking place north of the US/Canada border even as a New York felled by 9/11 continued to burn. Cynics may scoff (and have) at the feelgood factor to a show that some have been tempted to dismiss as merely a weightier Mamma Mia! But that's to miss the point entirely of the musical's canny portrait of a ready and unselfconscious empathy, which transcends the specific trauma from which the piece Read more ...
Katherine Waters
“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and they wear make-up, jewellery, low-cut tops – we understand they’re sexy, confident, cool. Several are African, North African, Caribbean. When the teacher laughs, which is often, it bears vestiges of the provincial attitude of “a young girl who acknowledges her lack of importance,” though it’s unclear whether the students notice for she Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Hot on the heels of International Women’s Day come three monologues written, directed and produced by women showing at Hoxton Hall. It’s kind of a treat, and kind of not.The current laser focus on gender risks the unwanted side-effect of alienating rather than including, and when an issue becomes so hot it’s hip, surface buzz easily takes over at the expense of meaningful action. Important voices registering dissent, noting difference, flagging up granularity and raising objections are not heard. But the balance between revolution and evolution is perennial and intractable, and the thing Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The Imperial War Museum’s Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 brings together art made in response to the immediate events and long-term consequences of the events of 11 September. In the main the exhibition is more historical survey of conflict-related artistic output than engaged examination of how artists have responded to the resulting conflicts, and what coherence it achieves derives from the paint-by-colours effect of dividing it into four roughly chronological topics: 9/11, State Control, Weapons, and Home. These divisions also make it pretty uncomfortable viewing.Since the purpose of the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Composer Tansy Davies and librettist Nick Drake’s opera Between Worlds cannot help but be a devastating tribute to the tragedy of 9/11. Yet the whole is peppered with problems that mean this result is achieved only intermittently. Davies – whose first opera this is – and the playwright Drake, with Deborah Warner directing, have picked a topic that would seem at first glance to demand the scale of a modern-day Götterdämmerung. The result they extrapolate is far from that – but when it does succeed, it is in ways that are not really about 9/11 at all.This is, essentially, the final section, in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I see a lot of things up there, I get chills, see shadows. I don’t know if you call them ghosts or whatever, but you feel stuff. They’re trying to tell you something.” This is bolt boss Mohawk Joe “Flo” McComber, one of the many Mohawk iron workers rebuilding the World Trade Center. A tough guy, he’s not alone in sensing the spirits of the dead. “The site is being take care of in a different way. You feel it,” says Mike O’Reilly, another ironworker.Belfast-born artist and film-maker Marcus Robinson has been on site since 2006, recording the rise of 1 WTC from bedrock upwards with time-lapse Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The eminence grise behind Touch is Tim Kring, who also devised Heroes, and it shows. Heroes was about a network of people with paranormal or superhuman powers, and so is Touch. In this case, we find ourselves in a universe which is underpinned by numerical patterns and mathematical probabilities. Only a select handful of humans can discern this astounding cosmic architecture and join the astral dots, one of them being Jacob "Jake" Bohm.Jake is the 11-year-old son of single father Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland), a former ace newspaperman now struggling to bring up a boy who has never spoken a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Ever since we moved into an apartment building round the corner from Ground Zero a couple of years ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, soon to be America’s tallest building. Now it’s reached 92 of its eventual 105 floors at the rate of one floor a week, its octagonal steel panels covered in blast-resistant glass soaring skywards, and Condé Nast and J Crew have signed up as some of its future occupants. But although I pass 1 WTC almost every day on the way to Wholefoods or the Gee Whiz diner, the area is cut off by forbidding fencing Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Idiotically buried by a release which sees it appearing on just one screen nationally, Kenneth Lonergan’s triumphant follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut You Can Count on Me (2000) is, without a scintilla of a doubt, one of the finest films of 2011. Rich, resonant and with a meticulous approach to characterisation, it captivates, convinces and challenges.Margaret opens on the streets of New York in intermittent slo-mo, giving the impression of a city collectively under strain (not least as such images are sombrely set to Francisco Tárrega’s "Recuerdos de la Alhambra"). Our protagonist is Read more ...
ash.smyth
Over the course of the past weekend, not to mention over the last 10 years, it has been said often enough that there are no words to express the horror of 11 September, 2001. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, of course – and sometimes with commendable results. But basically there just isn’t much effective vocabulary when it comes to describing grief and torment on a grand scale: hence, perhaps, America’s seeming lack of closure regarding the whole episode, and the often slightly surreal and distant nature of 9/11 documentaries.Shorn of all the noisy “bigger picture”, though – the Read more ...
David Nice
Ten years on from 9/11 and the polyphony of reactions will not, and should not, be stilled. Creative artists have had to tread carefully in what they amass, and how they present it. Headlong theatre company’s fresh-thinking artistic director, Rupert Goold, decided to let a babel of playwrights and speechifiers have their say, with no one monopolising the truth (Simon Schama, whose lecture stands out as so obviously his own, the exception). Threading it together, deciding what to include and discard along the way, can’t have been easy, but a dedicated team of first-rate actors just about pulls Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hiatt's regular band play as if they're taking a road trip from Nashville to... well, California maybe, Hiatt's former home which he sings about eloquently on the wistful country-rocker "Adios to California". Despite its title, it's the Golden State that springs to mind once again when he sings "Detroit Made", a dust-raising automobile ode not a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" and its tale of a trip out west.Hiatt has some serious stuff in his sights too. He wrote "Down Around my Place" after freak flooding wreaked havoc in his home town of Nashville last year, and the Read more ...