Editorial

" … members of performance cultures tend to think of justice not as something that simply is, but rather something that is done."

—Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Coming to Our Senses," 959

"As a cultural system dedicated to the production of certain kinds of behaviors and the regulation or proscription of others, law functions as a repository of social performances, past and present."

—Joseph Roach, "Cities of the Dead," 55

As Dermot Nolan has noted (and Parie Leung quotes), it is now "almost trite to acknowledge the relationship between the courtroom and the stage" (2), as the links between these performative sites are so pervasive and mutually dependent. And, as Sandy Petrey's distinction between the force of the same utterance by judge and court reporter attests, legal pronouncements are deeply illocutionary; their consequences are of profound significance for litigants and the officers of the court who prompt, record, and act upon them. The solemn donning of the black Sentence Cap is surely the most dire act of costuming (and almost the last) a condemned spectator/subject could ever see. While wigs and caps are not props of the Canadian justice system (though we retain gowns as remnants of imperial authority), the theatricality of our courtrooms remains vivid, the dramatis personae of a trial carefully cast and rigorously taught their respective roles by both the education system and social training.¹

The feature articles in this issue explore a variety of links between performance, the courts, its officers, the education of lawyers, the public expectation of courtroom drama, censorship, the possibility of rehabilitation, and narratives of memory, evidence, and truth.

First, speculating outward from a description of the fund raising "lawyers' shows" produced in a number of Canadian cities, Parie Leung thinks through the modulations from courtroom storytelling to scripted performance; from actor training to courtroom skill; from stage fiction to the competition between truth claims in court; from postmodern questions of contingency to the fundamental goal of a good trial lawyer: to lead a jury to an honest finding.

To what extent do judicial institutions perform themselves to reveal truth? To what extent does their performance transform into a species of truth necessary for their purpose? And what role does theatre play in determining guilt? These questions are taken up again in MK-Woyzeck, Tom Scholte's devised adaptation of Büchner, performed for the first time at Theatre at UBC. The production design featured Robert Gardiner's Digital Video Illumination system that established location and created costume. As Gardiner's projectors graft the twin characters "Lenny Barrett" and "Woyzeck" onto the body of one actor, the power of the theatre to create appearance and to interpellate innocence or criminality is made terrifyingly clear.

Similar questions are discussed in an interview between Guillermo Verdecchia and Liza Balkan. Balkan witnessed a police action that led her to create Out The Window, a performance exploring memory, evidence, and persuasion. On the witness stand, interrogated by lawyers who used her career as a theatre artist to denigrate her credibility while employing the very acting techniques this career had taught her to recognize, Balkan found herself on a "stage where the stakes actually mattered in a way that I hadn't experienced before."

The question of memory is further explored by Pil Hansen, who weaves together a series of stories pertaining to the development of James Long's play (published in this issue). Hansen explores autobiography, representation, obsession, and the everyday effect of memory on our constructions of self, but extends this conjecture to include the process of devising and the legal implications of using found objects. In the process of describing an actual creative process, Hansen leads us into a rich discussion of cognitive psychology, dramaturgy, semiotics, ethics, and liability.

In his history of Mavor Moore's teleplay The Roncarelli Affair—a dramatization of litigation that carried on for more than twelve years—A. G. Boss examines the slippery relationship between transcript and fiction, reality and entertainment. He, among other contributors, questions the role of film and television in conditioning audience reception: Parie Leung asks a series of questions about jury expectation and the contemporary audience's demand for...