Voices of Law and Justice: 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?