Introduction
The Inquests into the 1997 deaths in a car crash in a Parisian underpass of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al-Fayed, held at the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand, London during 2007/8 were in part intended, in the words of the Coroner, to “allay public concerns and dispel groundless suspicion and speculation if, in truth, there is nothing to it” [Baker]. The Coroner noted that, in the 10 years since the deaths, the circumstances surrounding the crash had been the subject of enormous speculation; “Books on the subject fill shelves in public libraries, television programmes have abounded and newspapers have frequently carried reports and articles, some almost to the point of obsession” [Baker, p. 18].
As a result of this apparent public interest, the Courtroom in which the Inquest was held was supplemented by a large temporary annexe in the courtyard of the rambling Victorian law courts in which the public audience, alongside the representatives of press and television (in excess of the 20 or so who could be seated inside the court), might be accommodated, watching live relays of evidence being given and of documents being scrutinised. The annexe provided seats for 150 and entrance both to the courtroom and the annexe was controlled on a first-come, first-served handout of tickets early each morning before the court opened. In addition, transcripts of proceedings and evidence were posted daily on the Inquest’s website. The clear expectation was that the scale of public response to the death of Diana, along with the interest in the conspiratorial narratives which had proliferated since the accident, would ensure that the proceedings received massive public attention. In fact, the Inquest was rarely attended by large numbers of people, and was for the most part watched by only a handful, comfortably accommodated in the Courtroom itself.
Subsequently, in the press and electronic media, narratives developed in which this non-attendance by large numbers of the public became proof of the overanxious indulgence of the authorities in allowing the Inquest to proceed – after a series of appeals by Dodi Al-Fayed’s father, businessman and Harrods’ department store owner Mohammed Al-Fayed, alleging a conspiracy to cause the accident involving members of the British Establishment and the Security Services. Despite the courtroom exchange of accusations and confidences receiving a consistently high level of media attention in the UK, this general tone of condemnation remained widespread. Commentaries also tended to focus on the appearance of a group of regular attendees at the Inquest whose committed engagement with the trial was read as further evidence that it was a wasteful exercise – their perceived eccentricity being the proof of this particular pudding. This essay will examine the characterisation of this audience body, employing models of analysis arising from performance and theatre studies to examine their persistent presence as a mode of social performance and to account for the meanings attached to it in media commentary.
Developments in performance studies and theatre semiotics, through Richard Shechner’s definition of performance as ‘restored behaviours’ [Schechner, p. 22], Victor Turner’s concept of the ‘social drama’ [Turner], Erving Goffmann ’s explorations of staging and scripting, of ‘back region’ and ‘front region’ spaces in social interactions equating to theatre’s backstage and frontstage [Goffman], and Keir Elam’s, Patrice Pavis’ and Elaine Aston and George Savona’s (building on Charles S Pierce) contributions to semiotic analysis [Elam] [Pavis, pp. 208-212] [Aston] [Peirce], have established the complex reading of social performance, of societal ritual and of the staging of events of public significance, and of the narratives which emerge from these events. Such analyses focus on the performative address of language and action in the social event, the qualities of enactment, presence and representation at play in such instances and, through semiotic analysis of the performance, the symbolic encoding and decoding of the event’s meanings. Applied to the analysis of legal proceedings, theatre and performance studies models suggest the possibility of a performance analysis of the ‘live’ events of the courtroom and the representational practices at work both within it and in its subsequent replaying and mediation in the wider social world. They provide a theoretical basis for consideration both of the commonplaces of the ‘theatrical metaphor’ as they are habitually applied to the forms of staging and address present in the courtroom – focusing on costuming, the performed rhetoric of advocacy, the roles of jury and gallery as audience to this ‘playing’ – and to the reading of performance as a thread of representational process which weaves through all social interaction but which is particularly intensified within the heightened formality of the courtroom.
Pavis’s famous questionnaire [Pavis, pp. 230-231] sought to establish a system of analysis for the theatrical event, developing the precise evaluation of the meaning of its constituent parts, including dramaturgical and theatrical elements but moving beyond these into questioning the social environment and context of the performance. The questionnaire itemises elements of the ‘onstage’ proceedings, such as costume, stage properties and scenography, for discussion and analysis to consider how “the event’s components separately” generate “part of the overall meaning”. However, it also asks the observer of the performance to consider elements not part of the aesthetic object of the stage, such as the “relationship between acting and audience space”. Asking “where does [the] performance take place” and “how did [the] audience react” , the questionnaire suggests that both the audience and the observer of the audience may be active elements in the creation of the performance’s meaning. A production of Macbeth performed in the darkened proscenium arch setting of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon is thus seen to have a very different context and significance to the same play performed in a promenade production in a disused school, as in the case of the influential PunchDrunk company’s performance, Sleep No More, in Kennington, South London in 2003, in which audience members witnessed different elements of the production in different spaces and in an order decided by audience choice within the constraints of the production’s overall shape.
When theatrical practices move further, to break down the separation between the aesthetic object of performance and its social surroundings, the role of the audience can become the core of the event’s significance. The participatory performances engaged in in the late Brazilian director Augusto Boal’s models of Forum or Invisible theatre (in the former the audience is actively requested to intervene and debate and decide how the drama should unfold, in the latter the audience is at first unaware that they are participating in a performance) raise questions concerning the possible, appropriate or relevant reading of any ‘staged’ component to the events. The implication of Boal’s practice is that the audience is a potentially destabilising element in the theatre’s transmission of meaning, even when the context of the performance is apparently highly managed and controlled – as might be seen to be the case in the social performance of the courtroom [Boal 1979, 1995]. The significance of social performance and its representation in the case of the Diana Inquest may be to depict the audience to the Inquest and the social performances which its members engaged in as part of a contestation of authority over the dominant meanings of the events being examined. Notwithstanding David Miller and Greg Philo’s warning that the reading of the subversive potential of audience ‘resistance’ to the authoritarian role of the media is increasingly fetishised, as “the activities which are said to be resistant are often trivial” [Philo & Miller, p. 56], the social performance of the audience and the subsequent representation of that performance at the Diana Inquest is an example of an intriguing interweaving between public concern and the affairs of state. Indeed, the question of whether or not the social performance of the public audience in the courtroom provides a participatory form of resistance to authority, or merely a rather pathetic misreading of the true nature of social relations is central to media reportage and discussion of the Diana Inquest.