Abstract
I am undertaking an investigation into the interrelationship between law and theatre. I shall explore the interrelationship between law and theatre by considering case studies in which legal performances have been re-presented or reproduced as theatre. Such case studies demonstrate that there are certain undeniable similarities between law and theatre. In both disciplines, performance and thus play, albeit very different forms of play, are central. Yet there are fundamental differences between legal and theatrical performances. I shall examine these differences, arriving, finally, at violence: legal performances are anchored in violence and theatrical performances are not. A comparison between law and theatre is not a purely whimsical one. Increasingly, as Giorgio Agamben has asserted, modern Western societies resemble a Schmittian 'state of exception' in which the rule of law has become powerless in the face of arbitrary acts of violence on the part of the executive and the language of exceptionalism has become commonplace. Contemporary legal performances in the form of highly mediatised terror trials are examples of state-orchestrated spectacle, in which the violence of the state is brought to bear upon the enemy: individuals who themselves have not yet committed acts of terrorism but who are easily identifiable as terrorists due to racial and/or religious characteristics. In such a context, the question of whether and, if so, how, legal performances can be uncoupled from state violence is worth exploring. I shall argue that re-positioning the play of law in more playful contexts offers imaginative possibilities for such an uncoupling.
Highlights
I am undertaking an investigation into the interrelationship between law and theatre
I shall examine these differences, arriving, at violence: legal performances are anchored in violence and theatrical performances are not
Contemporary legal performances in the form of highly mediatised terror trials are examples of state-orchestrated spectacle, in which the violence of the state is brought to bear upon the enemy: individuals who themselves have not yet committed acts of terrorism but who are identifiable as terrorists due to racial and/or religious characteristics
Summary
Examples of the first category of law in play include Arthur Miller’s The Crucible[29] and Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist.[30]. The play is a fictitious creation with invented dialogue, it was based on legal documents In his Author’s Note, Fo explains that he used ‘authentic documents – and complete transcripts of the investigations carried out by the various judges as well as police reports’ in order to ‘[turn] the logic and the truth of the facts on head.’[43] When the play was first performed, a lawsuit brought by one of the policeman against a newspaper was underway; Fo added and changed lines on a nightly basis as he received fresh material from the hearing.[44] In the end, there were three different editions of the play.[45] Mary Karen Dahl has explained Fo’s explicit appropriation and subversion of the official texts of law in the following way: ‘this was the strategy – to use the texts created by the state in the process of conducting its business as usual to comment on and condemn that business and its associates’.46
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