Staging 9/11 as an art form

On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York, artist Damien Hirst said the terrorists "needed congratulating" as they had achieved "something which nobody would have thought possible" on an artistic level. He called the fall of the Twin Towers "visually stunning" and "kind of like an artwork in its own right".

Unsurprisingly, he was forced to apologise. But Hirst was voicing something that has troubled many artists since 9/11. This was an event that demanded a dramatic response - but there could be nothing more dramatic than the catastrophe itself.

Nine days away from the 10th anniversary, many artists in London are voicing their own response.

This month sees a number of events in London's theatres, concert halls and galleries that show it is perhaps only now we can understand the meaning of 9/11 and its aftermath.

At the forefront is Decade, a site-specific theatre production in a warehouse in St Katharine Docks, performed by the Headlong company. Director Rupert Goold has brought together playwrights from both Britain and America, including Abi Morgan, John Logan and Mike Bartlett, as well as historians like Simon Schama to consider how the world order has settled in the past 10 years. Each has written scenes in isolation - including a look at the town of Wootton Bassett and a piece based on a British IT specialist who decided not to go to work on 9/11 - which will then be cut together to form the whole, reflecting the range of responses to the event.

At the Royal Court, Alexi Kaye Campbell's play The Faith Machine, starring Hayley Atwell, begins with a New York advertising executive arguing with his English girlfriend on the morning of 9/11 and worries about questions of love, ethics and spirituality. Theatre audiences are also served with fringe productions of Neil LaBute's The Mercy Seat at the Pleasance and an opera about suicide bombers, Manifest Destiny, at the King's Head.

Meanwhile, at the Imperial War Museum, Spanish photographer Francesc Torres has assembled pictures from Hangar 17, the vast aircraft building where the detritus from Ground Zero was collected and catalogued. At Tate Modern, German artist Gerhard Richter reveals his new painting, September, an image of the Twin Towers that has already been called the first 9/11 masterpiece.

And the American composer Steve Reich, who premiered his new work WTC9/11 at the Barbican in the spring, will release it on CD next week: it has already caused controversy after the cover art was revealed to picture an aeroplane crashing into the Twin Towers.

With the 10th anniversary, we gain the space necessary for reflection. Does London's relative distance from America give us a clearer perspective - or is it not our place to comment?

It's a question asked at one point in The Faith Machine, where an American interior designer who claims she had a friend in the Twin Towers tells a British writer she doesn't want to hear her interpretation. "There are things I'm just not interested in listening to."

However, for Goold, not commenting would have been a cop-out. "9/11 was really a global event," he says. "7/7 wouldn't have happened without 9/11 and our governments are bound in a certain way because of 9/11. So a British response is really important."

When I mention Hirst's remark to him, Goold chooses to see the events in theatrical rather than purely aesthetic terms. "If you take the time from the first plane hitting through to the second tower falling, which many of us watched live on TV, it's about the length of a play, of a Greek tragedy. The fact that the whole world was looking at one place for a consistent period of time is very theatrical in the true sense of what theatre is - a communal response in a defined amount of time."