Theatre
As Oscar Wilde paced the exercise yard in Reading Gaol, he was approached by another prisoner who muttered, "I was at all your first nights, and at all your trials." Theatres and courtrooms both offer spectacles where, if luck serves, the good end happily and the bad unhappily. Certainly, London's Tricycle Theatre has in recent years found drama in trials and tribunals, and now presents a reconstruction of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Through their ethical inquisitions, Richard Norton-Taylor and his director Nicolas Kent have almost redefined the term "show trial".
Their first reconstruction, Half the Picture, dramatised the Scott Inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair, and was followed by plays taken from the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and, more recently, the tribunal investigating ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. This play, Srebrenica, was given early-evening performances at the National Theatre against the overweening set for An Enemy of the People. Fittingly sharing a stage with Ibsen's tragedy of uncomfortable conscience, Srebrenica also rebuked that production's histrionics, for these Tricycle shows are determinedly unvarnished.
The Colour of Justice, like its predecessors, takes all of its words from transcripts of the inquiry. There is no dramatic reconstruction of the murder, no keyhole showing the Lawrences' mourning or imagining the police shredder in action. There is not even room for the notorious episode when Sir Paul Condon repeatedly stonewalled accusations of his force's institutional racism. The play's creators conceive of the spectators not as voyeurs but as a tribunal. "This play," they promise, "will give audiences a chance to get an overview of the proceedings and an insight into the evidence."
That evidence, and the witnesses' reluctance to concede it, is sobering. Even though 50 days of hearings whittle down to an evening's drama, the shuttle of questioning reveals far more than media redactions. Under examination, police witnesses contradict themselves and each other, while records prove mystifyingly vulnerable. To lose one official form is a misfortune, but to lose stacks of them - records of street searches and surveillance, vehicle logs, notes about the first aid treatment, photocopies - looks like callousness. The police appear to view all paper with suspicion; even when Doreen Lawrence handed a senior officer a list of suspects, he merely "crunched [it] up in his hands like a ball".
Also opening next week at the Birmingham Rep, in timely counterpoint, are two solos carved from miscarriages of justice. Jim Robinson, one of the Bridgwater Four, was wrongly accused of murder and only released after 18 years. His play Just Not Fair alternates with Corin Redgrave playing Oscar Wilde in a version of his prison letter De Profundis.
Theatre repeatedly sets dramatic justice against flawed legality. The earliest surviving masterpiece of western drama, Aeschylus' Oresteia, culminates in the courtroom, debating the extent of Orestes' culpability for murdering his mother. In so doing, the Athenians codify the rule of law. Measure for Measure, which tests law with individual frailty, is now constantly revived (Michael Boyd's RSC production reaches the Barbican this month). Shakespeare burrows from court to police to prison; so did David Hare in Murmuring Judges, finding each institution constructing itself around self-protective camaraderie. The police force, admits one of his characters, would be better named the police "club".
The club instinct - which coalesced into racism against the Lawrences' tenacity - has severely compromised attempts to examine both the initial murder and the subsequent investigation. Indeed, all of the Tricycle inquiries have had equivocal results. The Tories clutched ambiguities in the final Scott Report like rubber rings, while both the Nuremberg and Hague tribunals were tiny beams in an ocean of dark deeds. The Lawrence Inquiry is itself an admission of failed justice, of the botched investigation and abortive trials, but The Colour of Justice at least widens access to the judicial process, relatively unmediated.
A television drama based on the case, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste suggested as Doreen Lawrence, is in prepar-ation, but scrubbed-down reconstructions like The Colour of Justice challenge television's credibility as a conduit of anything we might want to describe as reality. Although a celebrated 1980s fly-on-the-wall documentary about the Thames Valley Police contributed to improved procedures for investigating rape cases, current TV documentaries prefer to be fluffy confections which turn individual lives into record-contract auditions. Meanwhile the police show embraces every popular TV genre, from vampire revival (Ultraviolet) to snort-and-shag urbanity (The Cops).
So where, amid docu-soap and docufibs like Carlton's fake The Connection, through vaporous spin and hype, can we find a less mendacious version of reality? The answer, as Wilde could have told us, is to trust the professed artificer. Go to the theatre.
"The Colour of Justice" is at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn High Road, London NW6 (0171-328 1000).
"Just Not Fair" and "De Profundis" are in repertory at the Birmingham Repertory Company (0121-236 4455) from 11 January
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