The Courtroom as a Performance Environment

 

In print, electronic and online coverage of the Inquest, its meanings were seen to reside not only in legal judgements on evidence delivered but also in the ‘live’ social performance of the courtroom. A performance analysis of the proceedings might focus on those elements of ‘offstage’ activity in this space which Pavis suggests. The Inquest was held in what appeared to be a converted office space. The Coroner sat on a raised dais with court officials before him and a Royal crest behind. To his right a further dais held the jury, to his left was the witness stand. In the well of the court sat counsel. To their right were seats reserved for family and friends of the interested parties. At the rear of the court, in raised tiers, were rows of plastic seats, on one side reserved for press, on the other for the public. Video screens relayed medium close shots of courtroom participants, or replayed video materials or evidence relays from Paris. Alongside these screens others carried the LiveNote transcription of proceedings, producing an instant written record of verbal exchanges. These materials were also carried on the screens in the Annexe, so that fixed viewpoints of counsel and of witnesses (but not of Jury, or, at least directly, of public or family) were available to the Annexe audience. Significant elements to be considered in an analysis of the performative elements of this setting and of the proceedings played out in it would be; the proximity of parties in this live encounter; the reading and negotiation of relationships of status and social function in this setting which are created by the relative lack of architectural ‘authority’ in the dividing of the separated spaces for the various groups in the courtroom; the interaction between the formal and the informal in this environment and the associated and perhaps inadvertent foregrounding in the courtroom of its position as a site for the negotiation of a web of contrasting and contradictory narratives. In this particular instance, the latter might include the personal stories, representations and mediations of the members of the public present in the room as well as the more serious, complex and resonant stories which the courtroom explored in the lives and attitudes of those on the stand.

 

The particular mix of the formal, legal environment and the informality introduced both in the daily setting-up of this environment and in the frequent breaks in proceedings drew attention to the significance of ‘offstage’ social interactions – a feature registered in previous theatrical modellings of Tribunals and legal processes such as those staged at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London, in the past ten years, [Norton-Taylor] where the replaying of such interaction as part of the verisimilitude of the production has been a prominent feature. However, one of the most striking elements of such ‘offstage’ interaction in the social environment of the court, and one which has not generally been a part of the Tricycle’s re-staging of such events, were the attitudes and behaviours of the figures populating the public gallery. On my own first visit, the gallery was peopled by a range of visitors, including an elderly couple who had brought along a tourist map of Paris to follow evidence, various individuals who discussed the trial, as long standing colleagues, with mutual friends in the gallery, as well as a number of people who appeared to be watching with a professional or scholarly interest. A man in the third row of the gallery was dressed in a suit, dapper, well-presented, albeit with DIANA and DODI written across his face in blue pan-stick. Outside the courtroom a heated conversation went on between a young man with a mass of curly hair and an older man with a bag full of papers about the reasons for a piece of evidence not being given on the stand. In the breaks between sittings the formal boundaries between communities in the court dissolved further. Here it was possible to witness a member of the public audience debate the interpretation of evidence with a journalist, to watch another discuss their apparent fame with newcomers in the gallery, or to follow the same individual approvingly patting the back of a discomfited ex-security chief after a day’s hard work in the witness box. To queue for a public gallery ticket was to briefly become part this group, a community who were often looked at with amusement or bemusement by legal professionals on their way to work in the surrounding streets, or with a degree of scorn by the members of the public walking past the accusatory placard held by one figure outside the front entrance of the building each day.