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War in Words: the Tricycle Theatre's Re-Voicing of the Bloody Sunday

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War in Words: the Tricycle Theatre's Re-Voicing of the Bloody Sunday View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Archivio della Ricerca - Università di Pisa Pólemos 2015; 9(2): 393–409 Sara Soncini* War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry DOI 10.1515/pol-2015-0026 Abstract: The tribunal plays produced at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, North London have come to represent under many respects the hallmark of the new spate of documentary work on the British stage, often designated as “verbatim drama” in contemporary critical parlance. Expressly envisaged as theatrical inter- ventions into the public sphere, these dramatizations of official public inquiries turn theatrical space into legal space, grounding their claims to veracity in the exact reproduction of the actually spoken. While crucial to their ontological authority, the self-imposed orthodoxy whereby the playwright is the mere editor of words recorded in inquiry transcripts has been put under considerable strain by the very topic that has played a central role in triggering and shaping the format, that of contemporary conflict. A considerable share of recent verbatim work deals with the war on terror, a war increasingly fought outside legal jurisdiction and hence a subject that has thrown into sharp relief the epistemological limits of a form of drama that is entirely dependent on the existence and availability of legal records. This essay looks at the strategies of “re-voicing” whereby Richard Norton- Taylor negotiates the strictures of the code in his tribunal play Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (2005). By turning the spotlight on testimony as a conflicted practice, Norton-Taylor’s editorial perspective provides a scorching critique of the long-overdue official review of the tragic events in Derry on 30 January 1972, and at the same time manages to indirectly address some highly topical issues of legitimacy and legality raised by the intervention in Iraq. Keywords: Richard Norton-Taylor, Nicolas Kent, Bloody Sunday, Saville Inquiry, Northern Ireland Troubles, Iraq war, tribunal plays, verbatim drama, testimonial theatre 1 The politics of “giving voice” on the verbatim stage Documentary theatre practice is historically rooted in the notion of “giving voice” to those that are seldom present in official public discourse, in the act *Corresponding author: Sara Soncini, University of Pisa, E-mail: [email protected] Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 9/4/15 8:13 AM 394 Sara Soncini of retrieving and re-presenting on stage their otherwise unrecorded testimony. The more recent revival of documentary drama on the British stage, which goes by the name of “verbatim,” places even stronger emphasis on the exact repro- duction of the actually spoken: the authors, or rather self-styled editors, of this new dramaturgy of the real draw on a variety of documentary sources – from more official ones, like legal records or the public pronouncements of politi- cians, to other forms of testimony such as private letters, interviews and diaries – but they all share the same reliance on “found” words as signs of the real. While the current use of the term to denote a genre, rather than a method as in its original application, has raised well-founded critical perplexities,1 the designa- tion “verbatim” aptly captures the twofold predicate that underpins the latest incarnation of the documentary mode, in that it gives equal importance to the origin of the text spoken on stage (the utterances of real people) and to speaking as opposed to showing, to the replacement of visual recreation with verbal recollection. The tribunal plays produced at London’s Tricycle Theatre have come to represent under many respects the hallmark of the new spate of documentary work in Britain. Most of them have resulted from the partnership between Nicolas Kent, the Tricycle’s artistic director until 2012, and Richard Norton- Taylor, a very well-known political journalist and commentator on current 1 The phrase “verbatim theatre” was originally coined by Derek Paget in 1987 to describe what he then saw as the “latest manifestation of documentary theatre,” that is to say the work of theatre practitioners during the 1970s and 80s who followed the method first devised in the mid-60s by Peter Cheeseman in his community plays at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent: see Derek Paget, “Verbatim Theatre: Oral History and Documentary Techniques,” New Theatre Quarterly 3.12 (1987): 317–336. Reacting to the loose application of the term to a broad variety of documentary or quasi-documentary forms in the context of the present-day revival, practi- tioners and researchers alike have advocated a more clear-cut demarcation between “documen- tary” and “verbatim,” in order to account for substantial differences in the kind of traces of the real they draw upon: see for instance Stephen Bottoms, “Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective?,” TDR: The Drama Review 50.3 (2006): 56–68. Others have pointed to the unhelpful co-opting of a technique to denote a form or genre, which ends up turning “verbatim” into an umbrella term of impoverished critical value (Will Hammond and Dan Steward, “Introduction,” in Verbatim Verbatim: Contemporary Documentary Theatre, ed. William Hammond and Dan Steward (London: Oberon Books, 2008), 7–13, 9) and one which, moreover, “needlessly ups the ante on the promise of documentary” by placing it within a narrow orthodoxy of word-for-word authenticity that “inevitably falls short of technical truth” (Janelle Reinelt, “The Promise of Documentary,” in Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6–23, 13–14). Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 9/4/15 8:13 AM War in Words 395 affairs. The verbatim projects that they have collaboratively developed over the last decade or so are entirely based on the transcripts of judicial proceedings and expressly envisaged as theatrical interventions into the public sphere. As they explain, these plays are borne out of a “sense of obligation”2 to investigate complex events of crucial public import and thereby compensate for the failure of the mainstream news media to live up to their public role: the Tricycle documentaries have been consistently presented as a response to the BBC’s questionable decision not to televise the major public inquiries they deal with, but also as a more reliable, fair and intellectually honest alternative to journal- ism in the age of infotainment.3 The high civic aspirations driving the tribunal plays help explain the the- matic predominance, within the format, of the war on terror and of the burning political, legal and humanitarian questions it has raised. Of the seven theatre texts edited so far by Richard Norton-Taylor for the Tricycle stage, two focus on Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war (Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Enquiry, 2003, and Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq – a hearing, 2007), while a third one dramatizes the inquiry into the death of an Iraqi hotel worker who died while in British Army custody in Basra in September 2003 (Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry, 2011); as I will argue, Norton-Taylor’s critical interrogation of the Bloody Sunday inquiry is also legible as an oblique political commentary on the Iraqi campaign.4 The frequency with which the tribunal playwrights have turned to the period around the Iraq war is not surprising given the extent to which this particular historical juncture has thrown light on an ever-widening rift between the citizens of Western democracies and their elected governments. The patent disregard of constitutional principles and international law by world leaders, the fabrication of evidence to manipulate parliaments and public opinion and, to top it all, a massive anti-war protest that went practically unheeded were seen by many as patent symptoms of the seizure of political agency from the public arena. With their commitment to retrieve information of crucial public import that may have been obscured or distorted and subject it to collective scrutiny, the Tricycle’s 2 Hammond and Steward, Verbatim Verbatim, 135. 3 Richard Norton-Taylor quoted in Hammond and Steward, Verbatim Verbatim, 122. 4 Other tribunal plays devised by Norton-Taylor and Kent include Half the Picture (a dramatic re-enactment of the Scott Arms-to-Iraq Inquiry, produced in 1994), Nuremberg: The War Crimes Trial (1997) and the highly acclaimed The Colour of Justice (1999), a rendering of the public inquiry concerning the attempt by the British police force to derail investigations into the murder of a 17-year-old black boy, Stephen Lawrence, by a group of white racist thugs. Authenticated | [email protected] Download Date | 9/4/15 8:13 AM 396 Sara Soncini verbatim projects are in themselves an attempt at redressing this perceived democratic deficit. It is however clear that by insisting on being approached as an accurate source of information, the tribunal plays enter into a contract of trust with the audience that automatically binds them to a different jurisdiction from that of drama. The tribunal playwrights’ pledge to provide a forum for democratic debate is in turn responsible for their very tight set of self-appointed rules. Kent and Norton-Taylor have developed a rigorous editing protocol in which truthfulness becomes equated with the unadulterated presentation of that which has actually been spoken in an official public context, in the exact way in which it has been spoken.5 This strict orthodoxy plays a crucial role in turning thea- trical space into legal space and in validating drama’s alternative voice, but at the same time it puts serious constraints on the playwrights’ intervention capa- city.
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