Quotes of the Day

After the immediate shock," says best-selling British novelist Iain Banks, "I thought, 'Thank goodness I'm not writing a book at the moment' because you just think, 'What's the point?'" A year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the arts community — including Banks, whose novel Dead Air comes out Sept. 5 — is among those starting to recover from creative numbness. And European screens, stages and pages are starting to see the result.

The responses seem to fall into three main categories. The first is epitaph-like memorials of the day itself, such as Anne Nelson's salute to New York City firemen, The Guys, starring Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, which has been filmed with Sigourney Weaver. Or British actor and director Steven Berkoff's solo performance Requiem to Ground Zero. (Both, along with dozens of other Sept. 11-themed shows, graced this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival.) "I haven't tried to make political capital," says Berkoff. "I feel deeply for the victims and wanted to portray that."

While Berkoff uses verse to emphasize the epic magnitude of the disaster, French playwright Michel Vinaver goes one step further. His homage, The 11th September 2001, which will premiere at Barcelona's National Theater of Catalonia in October, couples expressions heard on and around the day itself with his own translation of Euripides' The Trojan Women. "There is an illuminating relationship between the fall of Troy and Sept. 11," he says. "These two huge events of a mythic size seem to form a span of history."

Iain Banks thinks Dead Air slots into the second category, which examines the state of the world after the attacks. The story, about radio DJ Ken and his affair with a gangster's wife, begins with guests at a party merrily throwing random objects from the roof of a tall building. (Images of falling pervade the book.) Then comes the news from New York. Ken starts filling his radio airtime with political diatribes, on topics ranging from the Bush presidency to the Middle East. "Ken's arguments, although caricatured, crystallize today's issues," says Banks. "He wants a better world, and it's important to stay idealistic. Besides, art must sometimes be an irritant to stimulate debate."

Debate is at the heart of French filmmaker Alain Brigand's latest project, 11'09'01. He asked 11 directors to film self-contained segments lasting precisely 11 min. 9 sec. each plus one frame (a restriction that one participant, Indian director Mira Nair, called "French conceptual bulls__t"). Brigand describes the project — which also includes segments by Sean Penn and Ken Loach — as "an open dialogue. We have people from different cultures sharing the different implications they draw from the event." It is to be released in Paris on Sept. 11 and may well prove controversial, since some of the films depict stridently anti-American attitudes.

Artists in the third category are those trying to influence future events. The Oxford Research Group, a British pacifist think tank, is to mount a series of performances around Sept. 11 at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio. Music by Chloë Goodchild, who was flying over New York near the time of the attacks, will alternate with poetry readings and speeches from those who have renounced violence. "The arts," says the organization's founder Scilla Elworthy, "can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political."

What power has theater to influence people's views? "Violence is often unthinking," says Mark Rylance, artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London and one of Elworthy's performers. "But if we can get people to experience through the arts some of the problems with that response, maybe the memory of what they felt then will give them pause when they face an important decision. The theater has the power to confront such issues because it's primarily entertainment." Rylance also quotes Shakespeare on the role of an entertainer from As You Like It: "Invest me in my motley: give me leave/ To speak my mind, and I will ... / Cleanse the foul body of the infected world." To mourn, to discuss, to try to make things better — the arts world has set itself a mighty task following Sept. 11. And the words are starting to flow.

• JAMES INVERNE/London
• Actors and writers are groping for ways to express the horror of Sept. 11