Ground zero, Part 1

Kate Maltby’s essay on artists’ responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11th will appear here in two halves. This is the first.

There’s a moment in Rupert Goold’s latest production, Decade, in which a gaunt widow (Charlotte Randle) stares up and into the empty space just left of where the North Tower used to stand at Ground Zero, New York. Each day, she tells her listeners, she is staring not at the space where the tower used to be, but trying to find the patch of air through which her husband might have tumbled, voluntary but unwilling, to his death.

She doesn’t have to describe exactly what she sees in her mind’s eye, because we’ve all seen it ourselves. It’s a simple, iconic image. A photograph taken by Richard Drew, a photograph we all know, even if we’ll never know the name of its subject.