Voices of Law and Justice.

Subtitle:The (Re-)enactment of Legal Discourse in Tricycle’s Tribunal Plays and IIPM’s Public Trials

The Tricycle Theatre produced ‘tribunal plays’, staged re-enactments
of public inquiries about the failings of the British political regime.
Theatre director Milo Rau organised tribunals in Moscow — about artistic
freedom — and East Congo — about violent economic exploitation.
This contribution discusses the discourses of these performances, with John
L. Austin’s speech act theory as an analytical tool, including the fundamental
critique (from Jacques Derrida and others) on this paradigm. This theory
is also widespread in legal-theoretical analysis, which allows interesting
comparisons. The analysis of representative scenes from these performances
allows for the assessment of the ‘felicity conditions’ (Austin’s term) that the
characters/witnesses in the (re-)enacted tribunals try to define, in order
to affirm their legal and bodily identity in complex political and societal
contexts. Do these performances accept Austin’s (dis)qualification of theatre
and drama as ‘parasitical’ on presumably more real speech acts?

Publication year:2021

Keywords:performance theory, legal theory, theatre, speech act theory, Jacques Derrida, J.L. Austin, Milo Rau, Richard Norton-Taylor

Accessibility:Open