Overview
From 1994-2012 Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre produced an
extraordinary body of work that sought to engage, inform,and critique
British and International Politics using verbatim testimony to respond
to contemporary issues. Collected here for the first time are the
complete ‘Tribunal Plays’. 2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the
Tricycle’ sfirst Tribunal Play – Half the Picture. This collection celebrates a remarkable and enduring body of work.
Contains the plays Half the Picture, Nuremberg, Srebrenica, The
Colour of Justice, Justifying War, Guantanamo, Bloody Sunday, Called to
Account, Tactical Questioning and The Riots. Also included
is a brand-new round table discussion with Nicolas Kent, Richard
Norton-Taylor, Gillian Slovo and the playwright David Edgar, charting
the history and development of each show and the contribution the
Tribunal Plays have made to political theatre in the last two decades,
and a foreword by Guardian journalist and chief theatre critic Michael Billington.
Reviews:
‘Verbatim theatre is at its best, the closest it
comes to the condition of classical drama... The Tricycle's most famous
tribunal play The Colour of Justice… show[s] an almost
Sophoclean capacity for gradual revelation. And a similar technique is
deployed by Richard Norton-Taylor in his compelling condensation of the
Baha Mousa inquiry… The facts have the power to shock’ Michael
Billington, Guardian
‘Tricycle Theatre’s impressive series of tribunal plays… of administrative failure, buck-passing and moral inadequacy’ Times
‘The Tricycle’s “tribunal” dramas, edited from the proceedings of
judicial or quasi-judicial hearings, are rightly renowned… We engage as
spectators not of art or entertainment, but of politics and public
misfeasance: as citizens… It continues to be a telling point that
re-enactments like this can provide us with a more meaningful context
for live civic engagement than the actual affairs themselves’ Financial Times
‘A line of “tribunal” plays [which present] edited verbatim
account[s] of public inquiry… Like the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the
Hutton Inquiry and the Saville (Bloody Sunday) Inquiry, [the Baha Mousa
Inquiry] has been shaped into a compelling slab of theatrical viewing by
the journalist Richard Norton-Taylor’ Telegraph