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.

‘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