Half the Picture: ‘A Certain Frisson’ at the Tricycle Theatre

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, the so-called tribunal plays staged at the Tricycle Theatre in North London have been at the epicentre of the revival in documentary performance in the UK. Tribunal theatre consists of the meticulous re-enactment of edited transcripts of state-sanctioned inquiries that address perceived miscarriages of justice and flaws in the operations and accountability of public institutions. Typically, tribunal productions take the form of a forensic simulation of the inquiry’s disputations and setting, with actors playing the roles of the actual witnesses and judicial personnel, and performances invariably accrue an intense topical frisson since they are often staged more or less synchronously with the ‘real’ inquiry itself. The partnership of Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian journalist who edits the transcripts into a play, and Nicolas Kent, the Tricycle’s artistic director, has proven to be one of the most enduring in the postwar history of British documentary theatre. In this chapter, I wish to focus on the first of Norton-Taylor’s plays, Half the Picture, a dramatic re-enactment of the Scott Arms-to-Iraq Inquiry that premiered in June 1994.1 The Scott Inquiry was established to investigate the alleged complicity of government ministers and Whitehall officials in the illegal export of machine tools destined for weapons manufacture in Iraq, and consisted of 87 public hearings (with additional hearings in private).