War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Abstract

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 interventions 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.