Dramatic Justice?: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides and The Handyman

Dramatic Justice?: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides and The Handyman VICTORIA STEWART There are many obvious parallels between the action that takes place in a courtroom and that which commonly occurs in the theatrical space. The trial is performative: within the courtroom, both the public gallery and the jury provide an audience, while lawyers and judges display a grasp of rhetorical skills designed to assist them in out-performing the witnesses. The end result of the trial is not only the verdict, but a completed narrative, pieced together from witness testimony. In this respect, the lawyer can be paralleled to the playwright , choosing what each individual should reveal at any particular moment and, in the lawyer's case, persuading them to do so. Certainly, playwrights themselves have often realised that as a dramatic device, interrogation, whether it takes place in a courtroom or elsewhere, is an economical means of conveying precisely elicited information to an audience. Not only does the trial format dispense with establishing dialogue and elements of exposition, but the question of whether witnesses are speaking the whole truth provides an undertow of dramatic tension. The parallels between the courtroom and the stage cannot, however, be pushed too far. A trial has performative elements, but it is not a performanceper se, and although the general public is granted access to legal proceedings (and indeed compelled to participate, as jurists), there is almost inevitably intervention from the media in the interaction between the judiciary and the public. We do not go to see a trial in the same way that we might attend a theatrical performance , or at least not forthe same reasons. For the majority, knowledge of what goes on within the courtroom is likely to be obtained in the first instance from film and television representations. Suggestions that trials might be televised in Britain, as is the pmctice in the United States, contribute to a blurring of the relationship between justice and the dramatic. Do the "dmmatic" aspects of the trial necessarily make it entertainment? Mark Cousins's comments on the relationship between historical and legal "truth" seem pertinent here: Modern Drama, 43:t (Spring 2000) I 2 VICfORIA STEWART "RcaHty" as far as the law is concerned is a setof representations of the past, ordered in accordance with legal categories and rules of evidence into a decision which claims to rest upon the truth. But this truth of the past, the representations of events, is a strictly legal truth.' The legal may draw on the vocabulary or even methodology of other spheres of knowledge, such as history or theatre, but, as Cousins points out, this occurs within a strictly legal context. The same, of course, has to be said of theatrical borrowings from the legal. A courtroom may be recreated on the stage, but the theatrical context will necessarily subsume the legal: legal arguments may be presented by characters, but the ends of such arguments must necessarily be dramatic. The trajectory of a trial has certain "dramatic" characteristics - a trial could be said to be plotted , for example - but it is potentially as unproductive for a piece of drama to simply borrow from the legal as it would be for the legal process to begin to consciously appropriate the forms and methods of the dramatic. In what follows , I will not be addressing the vexed question of the live broadcast of judicial proceedings but, rather, will focus on two recent plays by Ronald Harwood, Taking Sides (1995) and The Handyman ([996). These plays have in common a concern with judicial and interrogatory procedure, and both also tackle the judicial aftermath of World War II, specifically the Holocaust. Both plays insert the trial or interrogation into the framework of a naturalistic drama, rather than casting the audience in the role of the jury (for example); but I will suggest that similar techniques of audience manipulation obtain as in "staged trials." My primary concern will be to assess whether, in using the interrogation as a form of plotting, Harwood downplays the complexity of his subject matter. It hardly needs to be stated that the Holocaust overturned existing notions of morality, justice, and...